AlexGr writes to tell us that Microsoft superficially has plans to embrace a little known messaging yardstick called AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). Red Hat, a founding member of the AMQP working group, was very excited about the news and wrote to welcome Microsoft to the party. "Suffice it is to say that AMQP is to high-value, reliable trade messaging what SMTP is to e-mail. The proprietary message oriented middleware (MOM) stuff on the market today like IBM's MQ or Tibco's Rendezvous fulfill the same role as AMQP. But they operate exclusively in single-vendor fashion and utterly fail to interoperate with each other. They are also — perhaps not by coincidence — burdensomely expensive. As a result their use is mostly limited to wealthy organizations such as Wall Street banks (at least the ones who are still in business) that need to network huge volumes of profession messages very reliably and very quickly. But AMQP's supporters feel the market for such reliable messaging could be much larger if a less high-priced and truly open third edition by the editors of the american heritage® dictionary. copyright © 2003 became available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Brought to my attention by

Mark