messagehub081.md

copyright	lastupdated
years 2015, 2017	2016-11-22

{:new_window: target="_blank"} {:shortdesc: .shortdesc} {:screen: .screen} {:codeblock: .codeblock} {:pre: .pre} {:table: .aria-labeledby="caption"}

Exchanging messages between the MQ Light API and the Kafka or Kafka REST APIs

{: #mql_exchange}

{{site.data.keyword.mql}} messages are stored in a single underlying Kafka topic named "MQLight" and are encoded as detailed in the following table. This encoding can also be used by other API types, such as Kafka or Kafka REST, to exchange messages with applications using the {{site.data.keyword.mql}} API.

Kafka message format

{: #kafka_format notoc}

Table 1. Kafka message format

Key	Value
Optional (not used by the API)	**1 byte** MQ Light API eye catcher, which is always 0xFA. **n** **bytes** AMQP encoded message (formatted based on the AMQP wire format).