What is the difference between Websphere Message Broker and Websphere MQ? Is there any equivalent terminology for the same in a weblogic environment? Also, strictly speaking, which one of the two (WMB vs WMQ) is an implementation for JMS API?
Answer
WebSphere MQ is a messaging engine that provides assured delivery of some message/payload. MQ provides a Queue Manager: a server application that hosts Queues (to hold messahes) and Channels & Listeners (to allow Queue Managers to communicate with each other). MQ provides an API interface that implements JMS. It also has a number of APIs native to MQ. As of WebSphere MQ version 7.0.1 it also provides a publish-subscribe engine. WebSphere MQ basically lets you put a message in one place and get that message somewhere else with the smallest chance of the message being lost.
WebSphere Message Broker is a program that attempts to provide an any-transport-to-any-transport interface, and an any-language transformation engine. In terms of transports, it provides MQ, JMS (most providers), MQ-FTE, local files, SMTP, FTP/SFTP, HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/TCPSSL, JDBC and probably some other entry hooks I have forgotten. Once the message is in MEssage Broker, you can manipulate that message using ESQL (SQL-like language native to Message Broker), Java, PHP, XSTL. It also contains functionality for message routing, collecting, aggregation, sequencing etc. Message Broker basically allows you to move data from a number of formats (both physical and logical) and manipulate that data before putting it somewhere else, possibly in a different format.