Jan 7 2010

Five things to think about when working with messaging solutions

Category: DDD | Patterns | Messages — fossmo @ 16:21

I’m trying to gather some of my thoughts around messages and that resulted in these 5 points:

1) A message can be created with any technology. It can be JSON, XML, Binary or a custom format. If you want to use the message in different technologies (like Java and .NET), it might be smart to go for a format supported by both technologies. Well, if you choose a technology like XML, it’s not given that you can exchange messages. XML is just a way to format your message, it doesn’t say anything about the content.

2) A message consists of two basic parts; a header and a body.
The header describes the data being transmitted and the body holds the data being transmitted.

3) The tree most important message types are (as I see it); document messages, command messages, event messages. You can read more about this messages in the book Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploring Messaging Solutions (I’m linking to the kindle edition. I love my Kindle :-) ).

A bit more about this message types: A command message is a regular message that contains a command. It uses the command pattern to, for example, encapsulate the request and send it to another system. A document message is used to transferee a data structure between applications and a event message is used to notify another system about a change; for example a price change.

4) When working with messages, you need a way to handle them. On the .NET platform there are several open source choices; NServicebus, Rhino Servicebus, Simple Servicebus and MassTransitt (it’s probably more solutions out there). I think all of them uses MSMQ when communicating the messages, but there are other ways too. There are probably some commercial products out there too, but I haven’t tried to look them up at the moment. For the record; you don’t need a enterprise service bus handle messages. A message can be used to communicate internal in an application, for example between bounded contexts.

5) Messages are immutable. You can look at them as value objects. Greg Young puts it like this; Mutable messages are an anti-pattern. You can read more about his at Greg Youngs blog.

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