Microsoft joins AMQP
It's very good to see this. For those that don't know, AMQP is the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, a nascent middleware standard that describes an interoperable protocol for application messaging systems. Driven primarily by companies, and not by vendors, AMQP aims to introduce new innovation, more competition, and better interop between messaging subsystems.
If you've read any of my other blog postings you know that interop and messaging systems are near and dear to my heart. This is very good indeed for customers who build and run enterprise information systems with a great deal of heterogeneity. Imagine if MSMQ and the messaging infrastructure on RedHat Enterprise Linux used the same on-the-wire protocol, and supported the same service semantics. This would mean your messaging clients could talk to either message service with full interoperability and switchability.
Some nice possibilities here. Great to see it being driven so much by the companies themselves.