Implementation of messaging protocols is a fundamental communication component for modern applications. Different application components require transmitting messages while ensuring reliable and efficient communication. A good example of ensuring reliable message exchange is implementing queues. Once a message is assigned to the queue, its destination is already established. This message will always get delivered. Moreover, if the destination is busy or not connected, the queue will hold that message until the destination gets back. You require a message queueing system to implement these advanced queuing operations like message persistence, message priority, scheduled messages, time-to-live, and so on. Let's dive into and understand message queueing in detail.
What Is a Message Queue?
A message contains a payload of the actual data being sent or received. These messages are sent by a producer and received by a consumer. On the other side, a queue stores and manages the flow of these messages in a sequential first-in, first-out (FIFO) order until a consumer retrieves them. It holds the messages waiting to be processed. These messages will then enqueued and dequeued in the order they are received to ensure asynchronous communication between the sender and the receiver.