Messaging pattern

In software architecture, a messaging pattern is an architectural pattern which describes how two different parts of an application, or different systems connect and communicate with each other. There are many aspects to the concept of messaging which can be divided in the following categories: hardware device messaging (telecommunications, computer networking, IoT, etc.) and software data exchange (the different data exchange formats and software capabilities of such data exchange). Despite the difference in the context, both categories exhibit common traits for data exchange. In telecommunications, a message exchange pattern (MEP) describes the pattern of messages required by a communications protocol to establish or use a communication channel. The communications protocol is the format used to represent the message which all communicating parties agree on (or are capable to process). The communication channel is the infrastructure that enables messages to "travel" between the communicating parties. The message exchange patterns describe the message flow between parties in the communication process, there are two major message exchange patterns — a request–response pattern, and a one-way pattern. For example, when viewing content on the Internet (the channel), a web browser (a communicating party) would use the HTTP (the communication protocol) to request a web page from the server (another communicating party), and then render the returned data into its visual form. This is how the request–response messaging pattern operates. Alternatively, in computer networking, we have the UDP network protocol. It is used with the one-way messaging pattern, where the sending party is not interested whether the message arrives to any receiving party, nor it expects any of the receiving parties to produce an "answering" message. This section is about data exchange between hardware devices.