TIBCO Rendezvous and MSMQ

Question

I would like to know the differences between TIBCO Rendezvous and MSMQ.

Answer 1

This is not terribly structured but here are some differences, there are many more than this. My Tibco knowledge is much greater than MSMQ so treat my statements on MSMQ with greater sceptism.

You pay a lot more for Tibco, the precise amount varies due to site licensing and negotiation but for a bog standard rv daemon with DR backup you would be looking in the range of 10-20 thousand USD)

Tibco RV has multiple client implementations in differing languages (C,C++,.Net,Java) and supporting multiple platforms (windows, various unix flavours). The client api is entirely platform agnostic (except where such knowledge is required for maximum efficiency, most users won't need to deal with this).

RV has the concept of clouds, multicast shared networks whereby a message sent to a daemon on the cloud will be transparently available to any client registered to a daemon anywhere else on the cloud.

MSMQ provides persistence of messages for later deliverability in the base product, TibRV does not (Certified Messaging api is required but then full control of the journal used for this is provided)

RV can use routing daemons to link a cloud across a WAN link (these are much more expensive than normal daemons)

RV uses the underlying message oriented platform to layer additional services on top of itself in a manner largely transparent to the client. Fault tolerant groups, Certified messaging and the routing daemons use the underlying message passing on reserved subjects to do this.

MSMQ can take part in distributed transactions, RV cannot.

Tibco supplies an MSMQ adapter (though I have no experience with it)

Tibco messages can have complex internal structure (with nesting of messages inside them), the MSMQ message is considerably simpler, structure is normally defined by the users.

Tibco api's expose the underlying socket waiting aspect allowing you to integrate the dispatch loop with other socket based api's in an efficient way.

Tibco has massive market penetration within the finance area, from discussions with them it appears a great many of their customers are sizeable companies with site licences and dedicated teams of administrators.

Answer 2

MSMQ also allows supports sending messages over the PGM protocol (which is a reliable multicast protocol designed in-part by representatives from Microsoft and Tibco). In principle, this is pretty much the same as sending it into the 'cloud' ShuggyCoUk alludes to, in that multiple clients listening to a PGM queue should all receive a message dispatched from another client, with the multicast efficiency of the server only having to send it once.

Tibco Rendezvous (if that's what it's still called) is:

• Expensive
• Rock solid
• Efficient
• Cross platform
• Cross language

I've never used MSMQ, and I have no idea what subset of those that do, do so over PGM. Probably not many is my guess. It tends to draw the reliability-trumps-latency crowd (the reverse is generally true for Rendezvous) and point-to-point rather than multicast.