Microsoft Embraces AMQP Open Middleware Standard 122
AlexGr writes to tell us that Microsoft apparently has plans to embrace a little known messaging standard called AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). Red Hat, a founding member of the AMQP working group, was very excited about the news and wrote to welcome Microsoft to the party. "Suffice it is to say that AMQP is to high-value, reliable business messaging what SMTP is to e-mail. The proprietary message oriented middleware (MOM) products on the market today like IBM's MQ or Tibco's Rendezvous fulfill the same function as AMQP. But they operate exclusively in single-vendor fashion and utterly fail to interoperate with each other. They are also — perhaps not by coincidence — burdensomely expensive. As a result their use is mostly limited to wealthy organizations such as Wall Street banks (at least the ones who are still in business) that need to exchange huge volumes of business messages very reliably and very quickly. But AMQP's supporters feel the market for such reliable messaging could be much larger if a less expensive and truly open solution became available."
Embrace, something, something (Score:5, Insightful)
Which leads to the question (Score:5, Insightful)
SMTP analogue? (Score:5, Insightful)
Suffice it is to say that AMQP is to high-value, reliable business messaging what SMTP is to e-mail.
So it sort-of works but it's 30 years out of date and every man and his dog has a different opinion as to how to fix its gaping flaws?
Re:XMPP (Score:5, Insightful)
I try to dissuade the use of JMS (Java Message Service) and use XMPP instead.
Why? JMS is just an API. This is sort of like protesting against POSIX or something. JMS implementations can be open source, commercial, free, expensive, whatever. I'm not sure I see your point, especially since messaging is not a core part of your app, and any sizable business will have an investment in a messaging platform already, in the form of tools, monitoring, expertise, etc.
Is this more of a competitor to the JMS spec, since it "reliable"? (whatever that means)
If you don't know what reliable messaging is, maybe you shouldn't be offering your advice?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking of standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of standards...
We should establish, as a standard, an enumerated list of the half-dozen or so stock Microsoft whinges that end up as eighty percent or so of the comments to any article that mentions Microsoft.
Instead of typing it fresh each time, or pasting it from a previous message, the poster could just invoke e.g. "#3", instead of "Microsoft will Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" and all its semantic equivalents.
Better yet, since the list will be pretty short, the Slashdot UI could be modified to include a drop-down list of the standard whinges with any article that includes the Microsoft name. Select a whinge, and Slashdot automatically posts a comment for you (correctly spelled). What could be simpler?
The aggregate time savings would be a major boon to the American economy.
Re:XMPP (Score:2, Insightful)
MQ systems connect multiple programs without having to be constantly connected, and guaranteeing once-and-only-once delivery. Banks use MQ to do data transfers, as they know each item will be delivered once. Also, MQ systems usually allow load balancing (say you have a high speed gateway which pipes messages into an MQ and then several hundred slow-processing clients running the incoming queries, then returning the results back out another queue which the gateway picks up and sends back out via whatever protocols it speaks). It's really great for making scalable systems as you can just increase the # of gateways, clients, or whatever as your processing needs increase. I run an ActiveMQ system at work and it can process 40,000 msgs per second at approx 1K of data per message. XMPP would work great (we thought about it) but doesn't do automatic client load balancing like MQ does, and it can't guarantee that if no client picks up the message that it will get delivered when the client finally does pick up their messages/reboots/etc. Think XMPP with a hard drive queue.
Re:Hey, give them time... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep!
They'll come out with the undocumented inconsistencies first, call them features, and the product second!
Re:Embrace, something, something (Score:3, Insightful)
So tell me, Mr Anonymous Coward and all who modded you up - what should Microsoft do? Just lie down and die because you dislike them?