Message-Oriented Middleware Systems: Technology Overview

2026-02-19

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of systematic comparative analysis among open-source message-oriented middleware systems, which hinders informed selection by developers. Through a comprehensive literature review and feature engineering, the authors conduct a structured evaluation of ten mainstream systems across 42 functional dimensions—encompassing 134 fine-grained attributes—including critical aspects such as transaction support, active messaging, and multi-tenancy. The work presents the first publicly available, extensively annotated dataset of message middleware features, offering fine-grained insights into their capabilities. This resource not only highlights the pivotal role these systems play in supporting cloud-native applications but also establishes a verifiable benchmark and actionable guidance for future optimization and community-driven development.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Machine Learning: Scalability of ML Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Social Networks and Social Media: Socio-technical web-based systems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements

Abstract

We present a comprehensive characterization study of open-source message-oriented middleware (MOM) systems. We followed a rigorous methodology to select and study ten popular and diverse MOM systems. For each system, we examine 42 features with a total of 134 different options. We found that MOM systems have evolved to provide a framework for modern cloud applications through high flexibility and configurability and by offering core building blocks for complex applications including transaction support, active messaging, resource management, flow control, and native support for multi-tenancy. We also identify that there is an opportunity for the community to consolidate its efforts on fewer open-source projects. We have also created an annotated data set that makes it easy to verify our findings, which can also be used to help practitioners and developers understand and compare the features of different systems. For a wider impact, we make our data set publicly available.

Problem

• Message-Oriented Middleware
• open-source systems
• feature comparison
• system characterization
• cloud applications

Innovation

• Message-Oriented Middleware
• Feature Characterization
• Open-Source Systems
• Cloud-Native Support
• Annotated Dataset