Extensions and Binding Updates for Business Messaging Open Standard Spec OASIS AMQP

  • Article

From:

David Ingham, Program Manager, Windows Azure Service Bus

Rob Dolin, Program Manager, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.

 

We’re pleased to share an update on four new extensions, currently in development, that greatly enhance the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) ecosystem.

First a quick recap - AMQP is an open standard wire-level protocol for business messaging.  It has been developed at OASIS through a collaboration among:

  • Larger product vendors like Red Hat, VMware and Microsoft
  • Smaller product vendors like StormMQ and Kaazing
  • Large user firms like JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bourse with requirements for extremely high reliability. 
  • Government institutions
  • Open source software developers including the Apache Qpid project and the Fedora project

In October of 2012, AMQP 1.0 was approved as an OASIS standard.

 

EXTENSION SPECS: The AMQP ecosystem continues to expand while the community continues to work collaboratively to ensure interoperability.  There are four additional extension and binding working drafts being developed and co-edited by ourselves, JPMorgan Chase, and Red Hat within the AMQP Technical Committee and the AMQP Bindings and Mappings Technical Committee:

  • Global Addressing – This specification defines a standard syntax for representing AMQP addresses to enable routing of AMQP messages through a variety of network topologies, potentially involving heterogeneous AMQP infrastructure components. This enables more uses for AMQP ranging from business-to-business transactional messaging to low-overhead “Internet of Things” communications.
  • Management – This specification defines how entities such as queues and pub/sub topics can be managed through a layered protocol that uses AMQP 1.0 as the underlying transport. The specification defines a set of standard operations including create, read, update and delete, as well as custom, entity-specific operations. Using this mechanism, any AMQP 1.0 client library will be able to manage any AMQP 1.0 container, e.g., a message broker like Azure Service Bus. For example, an application will be able to create topics and queues, configure them, send messages to them, receive messages from them and delete them, all dynamically at runtime without having to revert to any vendor-specific protocols or tools.
  • WebSocket Binding – This specification defines a binding from AMQP 1.0 to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) WebSocket Protocol (RFC 6455) as an alternative to plain TCP/IP. The WebSocket protocol is the commonly used standard for enabling dynamic Web applications in which content can be pushed to the browser dynamically, without requiring continuous polling. The AMQP WebSocket binding allows AMQP messages to flow directly from backend services to the browser at full fidelity. The WebSocket binding is also useful for non-browser scenarios as it enables AMQP traffic to flow over standard HTTP ports (80 and 443) which is particularly useful in environments where outbound network access is restricted to a limited set of standard ports.
  • Claims-based Security – This specification defines a mechanism for the passing of granular claims-based security tokens via AMQP messages.  This enables interoperability of external security token services with AMQP such as the IETF’s OAuth 2.0 specification (RFC 6749) as well as other identity, authentication, and authorization management and security services. 

All of these extension and binding specifications are being developed through an open community collaboration among people from vendor organizations, customer organizations, and independent experts. 

LEARNING ABOUT AMQP: If you’re looking to learn more about AMQP or understand its business value, start at: http://www.amqp.org/about/what.

CONNECTING WITH THE COMMUNITY: We hope you’ll consider joining some of the AMQP conversations taking place on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Stack Overflow.

TRY AMQP: You can also find a list of vendor-supported products, open source projects, and customer success stories on the AMQP website: http://www.amqp.org/about/examples. We’re biased, but you can try our favorite hosted implementation of AMQP: the Windows Azure Service Bus. Visit the Developers Guide for links to getting started with AMQP in .NET, Java, PHP, or Python.

Let us know how your experience with AMQP has been so far, whether you’re a novice user or an active contributor the community.

Thanks—

-- Dave and Rob