James AMQP is supposed to be "a message provider *protocol*" just like SMTP, or NFS are protocols. They achieve a goal simply and well in a manner which is broadly accessible.
So imagine for a moment you wanted to write an NFS server for an IBM mainframe. Mainframes have lots of interesting notions about how files are structured, accessed, secured etc, but to make a working NFS server you'd need to ensure that all of the concepts in NFS like an IP transport, a directory hierarchy, POSIX style permissions and filename character sets were all perfectly mapped. Some of these concepts might not even exist on source platform, and you'd have to implement them. But you'd do it, because you know that your clients value compatibility with standards highly. The same is true of anyone implementing AMQP. They may be adding it onto an existing, perfectly fine implementation. But that existing codebase needs to be modified, perhaps quite a lot, to meet AMQP semantics; or clients won't be interested. To quote you, "its more a case of making some new messaging providers that speak the same wire protocol?" Whole new products - no; but a lot of modifications may be required to existing brokers to achieve good compatibility - just as mainframes took modification to support TCPIP. If you know of an easier way to plug-and-play wire-level interoperability without compromising functionality, I'd love to hear it. I proposed that the AMQP Working Group create an interoperability subset of AMQP (let's call it AMQP-lite). This would be just enough to login, publish to and consume from queues. It would be easier to retro-fit onto other middleware, but would have to be an lowest common denominator solution. Would you like to help in such an effort? Cheers John On 23/10/06, James Strachan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 10/20/06, John O'Hara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [Important Note: - AMQP is NOT and interoperability protocol in the same way > that NFS, SMTP and HTTP are not interoperability protocols. If AMQP were an > interop protocol it would have a very wide tolerance for semantic variation, > and a lowest common denominator sweet spot; which is definitely not the > case. If you want interop, look at WS-I.] This note confused me - maybe I've got the wrong end of the stick. So are you saying that the point of AMQP is not really about interop between messaging providers (such as IBM, BEA, TibCo, Sonic et al) and for that we should use WS-I (or JMS which is how most people bridge them today) - that its more a case of making some new messaging providers that speak the same wire protocol? -- James ------- http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/
