1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for sending and receiving messages. In particular, the present invention relates to a system and method for sending and receiving messages using a publish/subscribe architecture. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to devices and methods for efficiently implementing a publish/subscribe messaging system on a distributed computing architecture.
2. Description of the Background Art
The use and proliferation of distributed computing networks is ever increasing. With the advent and business use of the Internet, the need for more efficient distributed computing system has become critical. The business use of the Internet has forced the integration of disparate computing environments with distributed computing systems that enable data transfer between such disparate systems. However, this in turn has created a need for better messaging systems that can handle amount of data and communication that are needed to effectively let disparate systems operate together and share information.
There have been attempts in the prior art to provide a solution to communication and data transfer problems associated with distributed computing. These attempts in the prior art attempt to solve this messaging problem by adding messaging systems that allow different applications to communicate with each other such as Message Oriented Middleware (“MOM”) architectures. MOM systems include software that performs the message-handling tasks that enable disparate software applications to communicate without requiring programmers know the details of the message handling operations. MOM architectures often require additional message processors to handle such message processing responsibilities. Thus, there is a significant amount of administrative overhead associated with such architectures. Moreover, unless messages are at a consistent level and a high volume, the added administrative processing resources can be underutilized and waste bandwidth. This is especially true as networks and systems grow in size and scale.
Another issue in the prior art is that most messaging systems provide only point-to-point communication methods. With point-to-point communication methods, there is significant processing overhead associated with establishing a point-to-point connection to every destination when a single message is sent to multiple destinations. As the distributed networks become more complex this only increases the amount of computing bandwidth that gets consumed. Further, the topology and connectivity changes are continual, especially in distributed computing architectures. This adds to the administrative overhead of existing point-to-point messaging systems because they must propagate such changes for each message.
Therefore, what is needed is a system and methods for implementing a publish/subscribe messaging system that overcomes the limitations found in the prior art.