

IMatix: AMQP ‘fundamentally flawed’ - zacharyvoase
http://lists.openamq.org/pipermail/openamq-dev/2010-March/001598.html

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dtf
That's rather damning. As a casual but curious user, I "got" ØMQ and was up
and running from a one page tutorial. AMQP left me scratching my head for
longer. It didn't seem quite as orthogonally structured. It just wasn't UNIX.

~~~
mahmud
Yep. ZeroMQ kicks ass; blinding fast! But people shouldn't know about two big
caveats:

1) It's a messaging _library_ , and not a server.

2) It has no persistence.

The lisp binding (cl-zmq) is specially attractive, but I ended up using Redis
since I knew it well anyway.

~~~
stingraycharles
_2) It has no persistence._

Isn't persistence achieved when you use a Broker architecture, which is
supported by ZeroMQ?

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smokinn
It would be nice if they pointed out why rather than a simple "this sucks"
with no reasoning.

I tried getting OpenAMQ up and running about a year ago but it was like
pulling teeth. On the other hand, I got RabbitMQ installed and working in
almost no time at all so I don't think the AMQP standard is what's getting in
the way of building a quality messaging product. 0MQ was still in pre-alpha
with nothing available to download at the time so it wasn't even possible to
use it. It's nice to see that the project delivered something useful.

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benwerd
Hrm. I've been talking through a decentralized social web architecture on my
blog, with an eye to building an open source project later on, and had
intended to use AMQP as the backbone for reliable message passing. This
somewhat puts paid to that.

ZeroMQ looks good, but if anyone else has found themselves wanting to shop
around, these detailed message queue evaluation notes from the folks at Second
Life may be worth a look:
[http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Not...](http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Notes)

~~~
revoltingx
Absolutely, I'm working on an MMO, and the complexity/flexibility of the AMQP
protocol has been a god send.

However, I do agree that its concepts are somewhat convoluted for a new user,
it took me quite a bit of digging to get the basics of what an exchange/queue
was and what bindings mean, etc.

However, 0MQ looks attractive but simply doesn't have what's needed for a
complex project that spans languages, platforms, and usages beyond the basic
pub-sub.

I would compare both protocols as XML vs. JSON, whereas XML may be tedious but
it's absolutely necessary for some cases, specially where tight specifications
are needed.

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luckyland
I recall some long running misunderstanding between iMatix and RedHat and
their roles in the working group.

Is this fallout from not being able to make that work?

~~~
phintjens
No misunderstandings... When the AMQP working group was founded, RHAT took a
very assertive role over AMQP and created versions that no-one else
implemented, and which were pushed through the working group by sheer
political force. Read the abomination that is the AMQP/0.9 spec, if you have
the courage. The determination of RHAT to create incompatible forks of the
spec is a large part of what killed AMQP in our eyes. We spent several years
trying to save AMQP from that. We failed. We're a small team, RHAT had 20
people working on this.

~~~
rdtsc
> We're a small team, RHAT had 20 people working on this.

They should have realized they already failed when they allocated 20 people
just do work on the protocol specification. This is another example of a
design by committee done by a large enterprise vendor and how it results in a
a bloated, inefficient and overly complicated specification.

All 20 people feel the need to justify their time by adding more crap and
features to the design. Usually no matter how simple or complicated the actual
protocol needs to be, its specification will always be proportional to the
number of people * time assigned to work on it.

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mey
I'd love to see a quick diagram of what the protocol's look like on the
network and compare them to various other MQ systems and other protocols like
HTTP etc.

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sliderr
"Hey this thing X is broken our new product solves all problems and is
superior in any way."

While I too would like to see AMQP 1.0 rather sooner than later and despite
the open standard there are only a few usable implementations, I doubt that
this new and great wire protocol will solve all of AMQPs problems which are
located in other areas.

~~~
mahmud
Don't forget that Imatix has a long history of producing top notch
infrastructure software. Their code is consistently, tight, fast, and pretty.

For anyone who wants to improve their C hacking, I highly recommend the SFL
(Imatix's Standard Function Library): purtiest code you have ever seen.

~~~
phintjens
Very kind of you. SFL is my work.

~~~
mahmud
My honor :-)

Several times in my life I thought of sending an unsolicited resume to you
guys, but always doubted I had what it takes.

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joevandyk
How's this different than apache mq?

