While AMQP is being standardized, implemented and used in many places,
including Windows Azure service bus and Windows Server Service Bus
the original creator of AMQP is pushing for simpler and open source solution: ZeroMQ (0MQ).
Here is an interesting presentation @ InfoQ
Software Architecture using ZeroMQ
by Pieter Hintjens, the iMatrix CEO.
He was co-founder of the ZeroMQ project in 2007, and before that designed the AMQP messaging protocol.
ZeroMQ is an opinionated message queue tool, with focus on extreme simplicity.
It was created out of frustration with AMPQ, that is "hijacked" by "standardization bureaucracy".
An Introduction to ØMQ (ZeroMQ) @ InfoQ
Wouldn't it be nice if we could abstract some of the low-level details of different socket types, connection handling, framing, or even routing? This is exactly where the ZeroMQ (ØMQ/ZMQ) networking library comes in: "it gives you sockets that carry whole messages across various transports like inproc, IPC, TCP, and multicast; you can connect sockets N-to-N with patterns like fanout, pubsub, task distribution, and request-reply"
Distributed Systems with ZeroMQ and gevent @ InfoQ
Message Queuing Options for .NET @ InfoQ
ZeroMQ runs at least 10 times faster than MSMQ or ActiveMQ using 1K messages. It does this by sacrificing the reliability features built into the other products including durable messages and distributed transactions.
Just released book:
ZeroMQ: Messaging for Many Applications @ O'Reilly
Same book is also available as free PDF book @ hintjens.com, for Purchase
and as a web page: “ZeroMQ - The Guide
with examples from the ØMQ community in C, C++, C#, Clojure, Delphi,
Erlang, Go, Haskell, Haxe, Java, Lisp, Lua, Node.js, Objective-C, Perl, PHP,
Python, Ruby, Scala, Tcl, and other languages.
ZeroMQ@PDX: 02 - Pieter Hintjens - How to make money from ZeroMQ from Pieter Hintjens on Vimeo.
There are other (failed?) attempts to evolve ZeroMQ, by its co-creators
Crossroads-IO
In the meantime, "big business" is standardizing on AMQP
AMQP
is apparently also "big" (less than optimal) as a protocol... like SOAP and WS*
