"Message queue" is a design pattern or software engineering component that defines discipline or API for communication between two or more interrelated processes or systems. The message queue enforces asynchronous processing and loose coupling. Depending on the implementation they may also provide delivery and order guarantees of the messages. Message processing guarantees are explicitly excluded from the design.
Message queue design pattern introduces an intermediary between the producer of messages and its consumer(s). This intermediary - the queue - accepts the messages and stores them until a consumer retrieves them or until some other event (e.g. expiration time). In general the producer does not know or care where, how, and when the messages in the queue will be consumed.
Software components such as MSMQ or IBM MQ or Tibco (usually called Queue Managers) provide queue storage and features for manipulation of messages in queues. These manipulations include: expiration, persistence, notification of expired messages (dead-letter queues), message cloning, queue security, distribution (between multiple Queue Managers).
This tag is best used for cross-platform message queuing questions. For questions about specific products, use or include the tag for that product:
