Keeping your fingers crossed and hoping for the best just isn't good enough where the transmission of business data is concerned. If a company has gone to the trouble of linking its distributed systems so those systems can communicate, it is safe to bet that the data actually has to get where it was meant to go. Unfortunately, communications can and do break down, while communication failure should never jeopardize data integrity in a well-designed system, repeated rollbacks take their toll in time, system load, and user patience.

JMS simply rewritten in Java to arguably much more than message-oriented middleware. As defined in the Sun specification, JMS has a different takes on messaging than most message-oriented middleware servers. Instead of requiring either queue-based, point-to-point messaging or topic-based, publish-and-subscribe messaging among application, JMS provides similar but separate APIs for both. One of the main advantage for independent software vendors is that they can drop a set of JMS interfaces onto their existing messaging products without having to alter them drastically. Some of the JMS products will provide both models.

The point-to-point(p2p) domain is analogous to a typical E-mail in-box. The message sender delivers a message to a specified queue, which is accessed at some later time by a message recipient. With publish-and-subscribe, you can create message "topics" to which clients can "subscribe." Take, a trading application that lets an investor track selected stocks, the investor chooses a stock to monitor by subscribing to it. The message broker then adds that investor to a list of recipients it will notify if the price changes.

ChanneLinx.com agreed to take part in the SonicMQ alpha and beta tests on an existing relationship with Progress Software. It had a proof-of-concept application in place, Within a day. "Very quickly, JMS began to change our entire outlook as to what was possible in terms of integration".

"The significance of using Java-based technologies has been far less time spent programming". "Prior to Java, these type of project would have been possible, but not feasible." About 40% of its 1.3 million lines of code was dedicated to managing the infrastructure now handled by Enterprise JavaBeans, JMS, and Workflow, and the platform was not as capable as the ones he is now working on. "Now we can concentrate our talents on doing analysis, not infrastructure."

Another reason to use JMS messaging is the tight integration with Extensible Markup Language parsers some vendors offer.

Many attempts at establishing wide-scale business-to-business relationships have failed. At the heart of the failure has been the difficulty many companies have in complying with one another's data formats. With XML, there is no worrying about whether the data you transmit adheres to your business partner's conventions, because the data is self-descriptive. Not only does an XML document contain data price or due date, but it also contains information about how the data is formatted. Assuming the client machine can parse the XML document, you can start doing business electronically without ever having been introduced to one another's data formatting conventions.