Weblogic is a big pain in the arse, in a way it is shit. Oracle is used to produce such bloated products.
-> libraries are renamed and sometimes recompiled by oracle forcing you to use their version

-> autodiscovery of rest services forces you to stick to jersey version embedded or get out of JEE and work with the beautiful spring framework.
-> soap services are bloated and blocked by libraries like SAAJ.
-> your app is tied to weblogic libs and in case of security breaches in embedded libs you will have a hard time trying to get out of that.

Using weblogic is like jumping from a high building without parachute. You’ll certainly pay a high price.

Huge companies went away from JEE, use tomcat, spring or quarkus or micronaut and stop spending money for Larry Ellison’s Yacht.

As a consultant specializing in MQ security and a former IBM MQ Product Manager, I can't reveal the names of my past clients. However, IBM publishes success stories from reference clients. Searching that web site for cases involving MQ returns 70 stories, most of which are named customers. (Some are anonymous.) The list of case studies includes the following:

1-800-FLOWERS.COM: Creating an e-commerce platform for the future
ARBURG gains efficiency – Standardization and integration with SAP on IBM zEnterprise
Aerzener Maschinenfabrik streamlines procurement and inventory management
Allied Irish Banks strengthens its position in Europe through core bank transformation
An international airport
Bharti Airtel grows at a stunning pace by keeping its focus on the customer
Boerse Stuttgart streamlines financial data management with IBM
Bucheon City
City of Madrid: Coordinated emergency response raises public safety to a new level
Commercial Bank of Ethiopia
Crowley Maritime Corporation saves USD500,000 per year
DONG Energy: Making the most of the intelligent electrical grid
EFiS EDI Finance Service AG boosts business flexibility and efficiency
Elie Tahari combines fashion savvy with powerful analytics
Enemalta and Water Services Corporations
Extending banking services on social and mobile channels securely and cost-effectively
Fifth Third banks on automated processes and flexible systems to deliver world-class reliability.
Follett Higher Education Group keeps online book sales on track
Fret SNCF reduces development and maintenance costs
Hera S.p.A.
IndusInd Bank Ltd. implements new core banking system
Irish Marine Institute: Listening to the sensors in the sea
Knoxville Utilities Board delivers better service through IBM WebSphere Portal solution and SOA strategy
MVV Energie creates the foundation for a smarter energy market
Marine Institute Ireland
Marketec Targeted Solutions offers retail customers an intelligent couponing solution with help from IBM
Meyer Werft distinguishes itself among global competitors by leveraging an SOA from IBM.
New Zealand Transport Agency
Ningbo Polytechnic sharpens its competitive edge by maximizing resources using IBM technology.
Northern Territory Government improves flexibility and agility
Oxxio uses smart utility metering technology to give more control—and options—to customers
PCMS empowers retailers to take control of the customer experience
PPS brings unprecedented flexibility to the South African insurance market.
RAC becomes the motorists’ champion
Reliance Life Insurance Corporation
Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. transforms IT to gain 1.2M customers in one year
SBI Sumishin Net Bank: A full-banking service, Internet-only bank
Sharp Corporation creates information agility with SAP and IBM
Singapore Land Transport Authority maximizes ridership to minimize traffic congestion
Staples
Swedish Road Administration breaks the gridlock with a smart road use management system
Temenos Group AG
The National Geographic Society traces human history through genetic sampling.
Transaction processing company futureproofs its infrastructure by migrating to SOA
Traxpay creates financial transactions service for global corporates
University of Western Ontario
University of Western Ontario
Utility provider accelerates processing and smart meter initiative
Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY) client reference video
Visiting Nurse Service of New York establishes enterprise connectivity
WestJet client reference video
WestJet client reference video - enterprise notifications
Westpac New Zealand gets proactive in the fight against fraud
Windmöller & Hölscher KG streamlines business processes

Searching LinkedIn for MQ jobs on offer reveals several more companies:
ADP
Andiamo Partners
Bank of America Corporation
Barnes & Noble College
Belk
Bloomberg
BlueAlly
Central Business Solutions
Chase Winters
Clear2Pay
Cognizant Technology Solutions
DTCC
Delhaize America
Dell
FIS Global
FISERV
Fannie Mae
Florida Blue
Influence Health (formerly MEDSEEK)
JBA International
JP Morgan Chase
Lowe's Companies Inc
Mastercard
McKesson
NAPA
Nordstrom
Northern Trust
Onora Group
PNC
Pixel Systems
Progressive Insurance
Prudential
Publix
Solace Systems
State Street
Techwave
The Citco Group of Companies
Time Warner Cable
UBS
VISA
Wells Fargo

Similar results can be found searching Monster and other job sites. As you can see, IBM MQ is used all over the world by companies in all verticals, from the largest enterprises to the SMB tier. It runs some of the most critical financial, logistical, and tactical systems in the world, some of the most mundane web applications known to mankind, and everything in between.

Some of the common issues we face in IBM Websphere :
1.Installation Problems for ex Connectivity with DB problem
2.Configuration Problems for ex changes in JNDI or URL settings
3.Server startup prblems.
4.Certificate related issues.
5.Sometimes Java class cache are corrupted.
6.Design problems where we we enable the Log4j settings.
7.JVM startup failure because of HA Manager issues.
8.Out of Memory and hung threads cause the JVM to comeup.
9.SSL settings where we need to pass the correct cipher like TLS version 1 or 2 .

Please note that above problems may not be a complete set, these are just the ones I have faced personally after working for an year on websphere.
Please feel free to add or comment on the above.
Cheers!!

I'm a fan of Kafka but let's be honest: with Kafka only, without using Kafka Streams, you don't have exactly-once message delivery QoS

Building on idempotency and atomicity, exactly-once stream processing is now possible through the Streams API in Apache Kafka. All you need to make your Streams application employ exactly-once semantics, is to set this config “processing.guarantee=exactly_once”. This causes all of the processing to happen exactly once; this includes making both the processing and also all of the materialized state created by the processing job that is written back to Kafka, exactly once.

In other words, the complexity required to accomplish the exactly-once semantics leaks into applications (producers and consumers) using Kafka as messaging platform.

MQ may be old skool but it has been built from the ground up with this requirement

Qualities of service that provide once and once only delivery of messages to ensure messages will withstand application and system outages.

That's why banks and credit card companies all over the world use it.

Footnotes

IBM Integration Bus (IIB) and WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) are both enterprise service bus (ESB) solutions developed by IBM to facilitate integration across diverse applications and systems. Understanding their differences and determining which to learn is essential, especially considering their availability.

Evolution and Differences

• WebSphere Message Broker (WMB): Initially introduced as IBM’s primary ESB solution, WMB enabled integration across various platforms and data formats.

• IBM Integration Bus (IIB): Launched in 2013, IIB is the successor to WMB. It encompasses all functionalities of WMB and introduces additional features, such as enhanced support for web services, RESTful APIs, and improved operational monitoring. IIB is designed to provide a more comprehensive and versatile integration framework.

Current Availability

IBM Integration Bus Developer Edition is available as a full-function version for evaluative purposes. It can be downloaded at no charge and used indefinitely within the terms of the license.

Recommendation

Given that IBM Integration Bus is the evolved version of WebSphere Message Broker, offering expanded capabilities and ongoing support, it is advisable to focus on learning IIB. This will ensure proficiency with the most current and versatile tool in IBM’s integration suite.

For a practical introduction, consider exploring the following tutorial:

Hands-down it is the community. I have participated in the MQ Listserv for 20 years and there are plenty of folks on the list who were there before me. IBM's software lab is well represented and IBM sends many of these people to the conferences, including non-IBM conferences. If someone were to tell me there's a messaging service 10x better than MQ but it lacked a thriving and active community with deep vendor support, I would not bet the business on it.

We tend to think of the technical aspects as being the most critical to success with a platform product but in 20 years of working exclusively with IBM MQ I find we seldom use all the bells and whistles. Almost all of the hard problems I'm called on to solve are political, cultural, or procedural. The technical ones are easy, and that's from a guy who specializes in security. I can solve almost any technical messaging requirement with almost any JMS-compliant transport provider. I'll pick the one with a community that contains literally thousands of years of experience with the product, every time.

I also like that it is now free for developers.

The documentation (of which I wrote or contributed to significant portions) and the fact that it is freely available.

The instrumentation capabilities for automation and scripting.

The thriving 3rd party ecosystem of tools and add-on providers, developers, administrators and architects.

MQ and Kafka serve different purposes. Another answer on this question goes into a lot of detail on this, so I'm not going to expand on that. But I'm going to point you at IBM Event Streams (which is actually sold alongside MQ as part of the Cloud Pak For Integration).

Event Streams is Kafka packaged up nicely with some modifications to make it more enterprise ready. I don't know exactly what those modifications are, but aside from multi-region capability they are all released for free as part of Event Streams Community Edition.

IBM Event Streams

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration

IBM Event Streams Community Edition

Mq has different kind of flavors. Personally I like IBM MQ with few tools like IR360. you can monitor the queues and delete the queues from these third party tools but you can’t create a Queue for these tools

IBM MQ

• MQ is used to support critical business applications. Reliability is important feature
• Integrate between applications, reduce rework, and costs by reusing working
• The installation of product upgrades and patches is very difficult. It requires the use of the IBM Installation Manager (IM). Most of the IBM applications need IM.

RabbitMQ:

• It provide you with a sort of web management dashboard
• Simple and straightforward admin portals
• The solution needs improvement on performance

This isn't the answer you're looking for.

I have what I call my "no fly zone", technologies I refuse to work with anymore. One of those is WebSphere. My problem isn't WebSphere itself, which is bloated and ugly but not a true nightmare. Rather, it's with the management mentality that leads to investing in WebSphere. At the enterprise level, there's a certain train of thought in management that if they spend a large enough pile of money on "enterprise" software from a slick enough salesman working for a big enough name, their problems will go away. There are organizations that will happily spend a couple million on WebSphere licenses, but would never consider spending that couple million on adding more staff instead!

I've worked in big enterprise, and still have yet to find a problem that can be solved by WebSphere, but can't be solved by lighter weight solutions. There's a lot that WebSphere can do that lighter tech can't do, but most of that isn't a good idea to do in the first place. Meanwhile, I've seen countless hours wasted and projects go to ruin, because WebSphere made them unnecessarily complex and difficult.

If you're competing with WebSphere, you're probably part of the problem.

Unfortunately, IBM has slapped the WebSphere “brand” on many of their products. The original one I am aware of is IBM WebSphere Java Application Server. Sometimes referred to as WAS or WAS ND. (for Network Deployment aka Clustered Enterprise Ready) Included w/WAS is IBM HTTP Server (IHS), which is a Web Server based on Apache.

Why would you use it? It is a Java Hosting solution (J2E), that provides pre-written, tested, and secure integration “hooks” into other popular and common software. Connections to AD, Database connection Pools, MQ, most popular Authentication/Authorization protocols, JNDI etc.. Includes Load Balancing, Queuing, Monitoring, Scaling, HA functionality, etc..

You could write/support/patch all of that code yourself, but I have seen the results of that; you end up 10 different ways of doing the same thing, 7 of which can be slow, wrong, bug ridden, insecure, unsupportable, or not scalable…

WAS and J2E Application Servers like it provide the foundation, just add the core Java Apps and you minimize the struggle around the rest of it.

Very Simplified Flow:

Internet → Load Balancer → IBM HTTP Web Server (IHS) → WAS →Java Code

Doesn't the S in SQS stand for Simple? Perhaps "complexity" is missing? In the IBM world we have MQ as software client and server, as an appliance, as an edge device, and as a DMZ component.

There's support for MQTT and AMQP, websockets, and multicast. There's JMS and XMS, which is the JMS API implemented for C, C++, C# and .Net. There's excellent round-trip support between MQ and Visual Studio for the Microsoft Crowd.

In the transformation space there's the Integration Broker, WebSphere ESB, Portal, Registry, and more. Within that space there are custom solutions and integrations for dozens of specific products as well as dozens of industry verticals.

Amazon's edge in virtualization is disappearing as IBM now has MQ Hypervisor Edition, Workload Deployer, Pure App, Docker support, and more. MQ shops with regulated data can build on-premise clouds that eliminate some of the thorny problems with 3rd party custody and border crossing, or they can make use of any of several MQ cloud hosts, and all of this interoperates.

If someone were wondering how to compete with IBM or Tibco, perhaps a better question would be what *don't* these products have? Again, speaking only about IBM's products, security has improved but remains problematic. There's large coverage but the devil is in the details around the edges. For example, MQ now has ID/password authentication but will send those credentials in the clear if you aren't careful and for certain configurations there's no way to prevent that exposure. The ID authenticated with a password isn't necessarily the one used for authorization checks. That can be enforced but only globally rather than policy per channel or policy per role. Access control lists and certificate-based credentialing are managed at each node instead of at the cluster.

Rather than compete with these products head-to-head, look for features the vendors have been reluctant to provide and for which users are clamoring. This is the tip of the iceberg with respect to IBM MQ and just the part of the tip related to security-specific stuff. If that's the question you were really asking, post it and send me an A2A. Of course if you need an comprehensive answer based on company-specific confidential details that is best handled under a formal NDA. Please don't reveal confidential or strategic company data on Quora in pursuit of better answers! (Happy to tell you why that disclaimer is necessary someday over a drink.)

IBM WebSphere is a kit of software products which helps businesses to build applications or integrate applications, databases and systems built in-house with any third party applications procured for various business functions with each other easily and quickly. It's called enterprise architecture integration (EAI)/middleware solution. Middleware acts as bridge between various applications and databases to pass real-time messages on actions rapidly without manual intervention at high speed with minimum down times and risk.

To give you an example, if a mid sized bank comes up with a plan to launch ATM or net banking facility for its customers and if it wants to connect core-banking application (main application used by staff to update transaction details) to these new ATM or net banking applications, they can either code or use integration product to do this. If they try to find solution by coding on their own to integrate these applications, they will need lot of TIME as well as RESOURCES (engineers) to get this done. And the bank may be running out of time to launch ATM or netbanking or don't just have enough skilled resources/budget to do this. In such a scenario, integration software products like IBM WebSphere will be useful. Within very less time with drag and drop kind of features, applications and systems can be integrated to make them talk to each other perfectly. And, by using such product, with no coding to some coding, it can be deployed into the production environment. And that HELPS!

There are many alternatives to IBM WebSphere. Its competitors include Oracle Fusion, Fiorano ESB and MQ, Microsoft BizTalk, SAP NetWeaver PI, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, Informatica, Software AG webMethods etc. and some other open source middleware and EAI providers like RabbitMQ, Fuse ESB, Mule ESB etc.

When a queue is opened the first thing the queue manager does is to resolve whether the destination is local or remote. It does this by looking at the destination queue manager name in the Open Options. If that name is not blank and is something other than the name of the local queue manager, the queue manager looks through all of its queue manager aliases and transmission queues to see if the name of one of these matches the destination queue manager. If the queue manager participates in one or more clusters, it also checks the cluster repository for matches. If one is found by any of these methods, the queue manager resolves the OPEN call to a transmission queue leading to that remote queue manager.

The only difference between a single-hop versus a multi-hop is whether the thing opening the queue is an application or a channel agent.

So let's say a message originates on QMGRA, destined for QMGRC and must travel through QMGRB. When the app on QMGRA opens the queue and specifies QMGRC as the destination, QMGRA must resolve to a transmission queue. This will probably be because a queue manager alias points to a transmission queue names QMGRB. Once on the XMitQ, the message goes to QMGRB.

On arrival at QMGRB, the channel agent sees the destination is QMGRC and causes the queue manager to drive the resolution process. QMGRB will find a transmission queue named QMGRC, or a queue manager alias, or a cluster queue manager entry, thus causing the OPEN to resolve to a transmission queue leading to QMGRC.

As a rule, transmission queues will have the name of the adjacent QMgr and so act as natural targets for queue manager name resolution. When they do not, or when the target queue manager is two or more hops away, a queue manager alias is required.

A queue manager alias is simply a QREMOTE definition with the same name as the destination queue manager, that specifies a transmission queue but no remote queue manager name and no remote queue name. For purposes of queue manager resolution it says "to get to the QMgr with the same name as this object, put messages onto this XMitQ."

There are more specialized routing options, such as the B2B gateway in which only named routes are allowed, and hub-and-spoke in which security is usually somewhere between the anything-goes routing described above and the white-listed routing used for B2B, but this is the essence of how the name resolution works. If you understand MQ's name resolution and security, it is possible to construct all manner of network topologies of arbitrary complexity but the best advice is to keep it simple as possible.

There’s a simple rule of marketing — you never re-brand a successful product. A successful brand is the most valuable asset for a product company. Every company tries to leverage their successful brands as much as they can. Take for instance Adobe Photoshop. This product is so successful that Adobe has several other offerings named after the same brand:

• Photoshop Elements
• Photoshop Mix
• Photoshop Fix
• Photoshop Sketch
• Photoshop Express

On the other hand, WebSphere series of products are too “heavy” and do not scale well in the cloud-oriented world where scalability and performance have become the most critical aspects of any server-side offering.

So IBM are doing the right thing by simplifying their WebSphere portfolio, and also re-branding it to give it a fresh start in the market.