Monday, November 19, 2007

RedHat buys then open sources AMQP implementation

How did I miss this event?

Previously I've blogged about Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP), an effort by JPMorgan to commoditize messaging and break the back (i.e. save on the hugely expensive licensing costs) of the messaging behemoths Tibco and IBM.

According to this article RedHat bought an AMQP implementation from JPMorgan, improved it, then gave the implementation to the Apache Foundation as the QPid project. Currently there is a Java and C++ broker with clients in C++, Java (JMS), Ruby, Pyhton and C# for .NET.

Red Hat has the ambitious goal of enabling a server to process 1 million messages per second.

I guess JP didn't have an interest in maintaining the AMQP implementation, but RedHat are not exactly cheap when it comes to maintenance fees (but so far cheaper than Tibco and IBM).

Update: Microsoft have joined the AMQP working group!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your interest in AMQP.

Some of the recent press activity around Red Hat is inaccurate.

The things which are true are:
1) the AMQP protocol is developed by several companies and is an Open Standard
2) There have been commercially supported AMQP implementations available for quite some time e.g. OpenAMQ from iMatix and RabbitMQ
3) Apache Qpid is worked on by several diverse communities - everyone on the Apache project is improving the technology; as are the other suppliers

The companies involved in AMQP are committed to standardizing MOM - it's unfortunate that the press have presented an unbalanced view.

Robert Maldon said...

Thanks for the clarifications. I wonder where the disconnect began.

I'm aware of some of the commercial offerings like RabbitMQ but it is always great to see open source implementations - having access to source code is incredibly valuable to someone like me who makes their living writing custom code.

I haven't encountered AMQP at any of my clients yet (Tibco and MQ still dominate) but I'm keeping an eye out for it.