I think it is great that there is so much new development for messaging products. Last week I looked at ActiveMQ (codehaus)
http://activemq.codehaus.org/ Looks like Apache Geronimo will use it.
At my work, we use SonicMQ, which works pretty well. Its Java based, but has a C and COM API as well as a HTTP Server so you can post messages to it via HTTP. Anybody can write a messaging system, but getting one that fails over, clusters, routes, etc. is a bit more effort.
I've found messaging based systems to be really enjoyable to work with. They take a lot of thought, but you can massively scale (e.g., the Aggregator pattern). Also, they encourage loosely coupled systems.
Also, when you use XML as your message payload you can get very good interop (provided you pick a messaging system that provides APIs for the clients you need).
We tried to make "Web Services" work, but you really need messaging infrastructure (e.g., security, routing, guaranteed delivery). You can get a fairly cheap / robust integration architecture with a decent messaging system and an XML canonical message format.
It looks like the messaging layer will get commoditized. Looks like trouble for MQSeries, SonicMQ, Tibco, etc. Not sure where AMQ will go, but ActiveMQ is bound to go places since it is a part of Geronimo.
There is also (well at least on the Java side) an effort to drive standardization up the stack with JSR 208 - Java Business Integration. Its basically a spec for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) / Service Oriented Architecture.
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At my work, we use SonicMQ, which works pretty well. Its Java based, but has a C and COM API as well as a HTTP Server so you can post messages to it via HTTP. Anybody can write a messaging system, but getting one that fails over, clusters, routes, etc. is a bit more effort.
I've found messaging based systems to be really enjoyable to work with. They take a lot of thought, but you can massively scale (e.g., the Aggregator pattern). Also, they encourage loosely coupled systems.
Also, when you use XML as your message payload you can get very good interop (provided you pick a messaging system that provides APIs for the clients you need).
We tried to make "Web Services" work, but you really need messaging infrastructure (e.g., security, routing, guaranteed delivery). You can get a fairly cheap / robust integration architecture with a decent messaging system and an XML canonical message format.
It looks like the messaging layer will get commoditized. Looks like trouble for MQSeries, SonicMQ, Tibco, etc. Not sure where AMQ will go, but ActiveMQ is bound to go places since it is a part of Geronimo.
There is also (well at least on the Java side) an effort to drive standardization up the stack with JSR 208 - Java Business Integration. Its basically a spec for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) / Service Oriented Architecture.