The road to writing a new protocol is long and lonely
February 24, 2011 – 10:13 am
The AMQP Implements SIG
We have been working on the 1.0 specification for AMQP for around 6 months and for most of that time Raph (our MD) and Eamon (our CTO) have been locked away from civilisation in a darkened room working on code.
Writing a new protocol specification has three main steps, namely the agreement, implementation and interoperability stages. The agreement stage was achieved in May 2010. While this was a very important stage in the protocol development process it is also one of the easiest (in terms of technical challenges). At this stage the protocol is nothing more than a stated objective and because nobody has written a line of code yet it is completely untested.
The implementation stage is a technically complicated stage. StormMQ joined the working group at the start of this stage and we are now working with a team of implementers on code using the AMQP 1.0 spec. This group includes Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, INETCO, RedHat and RabbitMQ (VMWARE). For the last 6 months this team has been working diligently with only a mailing list to keep the group together. The work has been hard and change to the specification has been frantic. To help keep the process moving we have resorted to organising 4 ‘connect-a-thons’ where the various teams get together for a week to thrash out our issues. The first of these connect-a-thons was in December 2010 in Redmond. RabbitMQ (VMWARE) hosted the second ‘connect-a-thon’ in February 2011 at their London offices. The third event will take place in March 2011 in Boston and the final in May 2011 in Gateshead.
Our goal with this stage of the protocol development is to come up with some real working code examples of how to implement the new AMQP 1.0 specification. Out of this we expect to be well placed to start the interoperability testing…..our goal is to get all this done by the end of July 2011.
In his January 2011 report on the messaging industry, Roy Schulte from Gartner commented that AMQP currently lacks a ‘critical mass’ of vendors. The combined market capitalisation of the companies currently working on AMQP 1.0 code tops US$500b…I consider this a critical mass.
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