Microsoft Embraces AMQP Open Middleware Standard

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."

Comments

Interesting, though not necessarily a big change..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While "MS Embraces $STANDARD" is certainly rather unusual news(rather, instances of "MS Embraces $STANDARD" that aren't immediately followed by "and Extends" are), I'm not sure that this is actually a big strategic change for MS.

For a while now, MS has been the big, bad, expensive monopolist, with *nix and FOSS the freedom loving underdogs; but it should be remembered that MS was once the scrappy, cheap alternative to Big Blue and the proprietary Unix club. In most areas that has changed, since MS has largely taken over and started to tighten the screws; but I suspect that crazy expensive corporate middleware is a fairly conservative market.

This looks more like an alliance of the cheapish, freeish underdogs against the old school proprietary iron guys rather than a change of heart at MS.

XMPP

[tmarthal]

This is the first that I've heard of this technology. Can anyone post how this is different than XMPP (http://xmpp.org)? XMPP is the updated name of the Jabber protocol.

I know that every project that I get on, I try to dissuade the use of JMS (Java Message Service) and use XMPP instead. Is this more of a competitor to the JMS spec, since it "reliable"? (whatever that means)

Why is Red Hat excited?

[FranTaylor]

Perhaps they feel that Microsoft brings recognition to a technology that RedHat is poised to exploit in their products. RedHat is only too happy to compete with Microsoft on an even playing field.

AMQP for Beginners

[mpapet]

Here's a real-world application for AMQP.

Let's say there are two banks, BA and WTF. Every day they have debits and credits flying back and forth.

A protocol like AMQP makes exchanging messages (aka transaction) robust. Bank's IT guy gets mad and pulls the T1 out the wall at BA? Messages do a few things like wait in a queue at BA.

The messages that were sent to WTF before the cable was pulled were processed by WTF and wait in a queue at WTF unti BA comes back online.

That's a simple example. There is lots of information outside of the banking world where robust messaging is required.