Steve Vinoski extolls the new AMQP standardisation effort for Message Oriented Middleware in Middleware Matters: Finally, a messaging standard. We wish them success with thiese efforts!
Posted by mofoghlu at June 22, 2006 09:40 AMHaving been involved in middleware standards for many years, I've often wondered why real message-oriented middleware (MOM) standards didn't seem to exist. There are proprietary message queuing products, but they don't talk to each other. There's JMS, but of course that's just an API standard, and actual JMS implementations don't necessarily talk to each other, either.
Today, a number of companies, including IONA, Cisco, JPMorgan Chase, and Red Hat, announced the formation of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group. There are currently several interoperable implementations of AMQP 0.8 in production, and this group is initially working to produce an AMQP 1.0 specification. I think John O'Hara, VP and Distinguished Engineer at JPMorgan, sums it up perfectly: "AMQP solves the 'missing middleware standard' problem."
These days, standards are all too often designed by committee, or are solutions (usually poor ones) in search of a problem. Judging from a recent panel that I was part of, people are fed up with this. I've previously written about problems with standards, and my old friend Michi Henning just published an article that details such as problems as well. The beauty of this AMQP effort is that the working group is formed around an already-working system. In other words, we're taking something already proven to work well in practice and standardizing it. That's exactly how standards should be created.
Look here for more information about AMQP and to download the 0.8 specification.