Message broker providing a publish/subscribe service and method of processing messages in a publish/subscribe environment

摘要

Provided is a message broker supporting a publish/subscribe service. The broker is adapted to identify, 120-150, characteristics of the content of messages received from publisher application programs and to use the identification of message content characteristics to determine, 160, which of a set of message handler modules to pass the message to. The selected message handler module processes the message and then one or more derived messages are sent, 200, to subscribers for which this message type or message content has been requested. One or more message handler modules are preferably multimedia processing modules and they are selected in response to identification of particular multimedia types within the message content. Processing by the handler module may be dependent, 180, on subscriber requirements. The broker may be distributed (Fig 2).