Having 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.
Comments (3)
FYI, a detailed news item on AMQP and discussion with all the major stakeholders is at InfoQ:
http://www.infoq.com/news/amq
Posted by Floyd Marinescu | June 22, 2006 5:09 PM
Posted on June 22, 2006 17:09
Steve, until recently I shared the sentiment against early standardization; however, I had a thought which I presented as a lightning (3min) talk to the W3C Advisory Committee at its meeting in May; you can see the written version at http://www.jacek.cz/blog/archives/000075.html
In a nutshell, I believe the value of standardization may have evolved and it is now feasible and sometimes even required before we have a proven common ground.
Posted by Jacek | June 28, 2006 7:44 AM
Posted on June 28, 2006 07:44
Hi Jacek, I've seen those lightning slides and think they convey some reasonable ideas. I think what your lightning talk suggests is iteration -- first gauge what parts of a given area could benefit from standardization, standardize a little, see what sticks, and iterate. If that's a fair characterization of what your talk was about, then I agree that it's a good practical approach.
I definitely don't want people to get the idea that I hold extreme views in this area, as if I'm saying "we don't need standards at all" or "standards must always follow adoption." In general I tend to take moderate and practical views of things, rather than siding with one extreme or another. I guess that ultimately what I'm really trying to say is that in general standards are a sort of necessary evil, and we just need to stay vigilant so that we end up with more "necessary" than "evil." :-)
Posted by Steve Vinoski | June 28, 2006 10:07 AM
Posted on June 28, 2006 10:07