
RESTful Web services Message-oriented middleware (MOM) lets a service's consumers physically and temporally decouple from the service providers. Communication between service providers and their consumers is asynchronous, and they don't need to be available at the same time because they communicate by sending and receiving messages from designated message queues. In contrast, RPC is a synchronous method of requesting remote service execution. Consumers must suspend service execution until they receive a reply from the provider. MOM and RPC have advantages and disadvantages. MOM solutions tend to be more robust to failures than RPC, and they allow service requesters to continue to process while service providers work on their requests. However, programming MOM-based applications is more cumbersome because distribution isn't as transparent to the programmer as with RPCs. In this column, I provide a quantitative framework you can use to compare MOM- and RPC...