The primary disadvantage of message oriented middleware stems from its requiring an extra component in the architecture, the message transfer agent. As with any system, adding another component can lead to reductions in performance and reliability, and can also make the system as a whole more difficult and expensive to maintain.
In addition, many inter-application communications have an intrinsically synchronous aspect, with the sender specifically wanting to wait for a reply before continuing (see real-time computing and near-real-time for extreme cases). Because message-based communication inherently functions asynchronously, it may not fit well in such situations. That said, most MOM systems have facilities to group a request and a response as a single pseudo-synchronous transaction.
[edit] Lack of standards
The lack of standards governing the use of message oriented middleware has caused problems. All the major vendors have their own implementations, each with its own application programming interface (API) and management tools.
The Java EE programming environment provides a standard API called JMS (Java Message Service), which is implemented by most MOM vendors and aims to hide the particular MOM API implementations. Microsoft's MSMQ doesn't support JMS, although there are third-party products that can offer this
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8:10 PM on December 17, 2008
