Rajith’s Column

I guess by now many have heard that Microsoft is joining the Apache Qpid project and the AMQP Working Group. Sam Ramji mentioned this during his key note at the Apache Con US 2008. This is indeed great news for both the AMQP working group as well as the Apache Qpid community.

One of the engineers from Microsoft Anandeep Pannu, has written very excitedly about participating in Qpid.

In July Sam Ramji announced a sponsorship for the Apache Software Foundation. It kind of signaled about their intent to get their feet wet with playing an active role in open source. It seems that most large vendors have realized the importance of participating and promoting open source on one hand and also harnessing the power of open source on the other hand. IBM for instance played this strategy very well over the last decade or so. This is very good PR for the Qpid project and hopefully attract more participants and end users to the project. Definitely looking forward to working them in Qpid and the AMQP working group.

A lot of folks have asked me as to why I have not written the next part in the series after Oct,2007. So I think I owe an explanation.
I guess I started the series a bit early, and at that time the protocol was going through a phase of rapid changes. So I decided to wait until the dust has settled, as there is no point in writing about something that may change within a short time. However it took the working group a bit longer than expected to thrash out the 0-10 version.
Now the AMQP working group is working towards a 1.0 release. So I think it would be worthwhile to wait until we have firmed up the 1.0 spec as it makes sense to write about a final 1.0 release than an interim version. I don’t expect a lot to change between 0-10 and 1.0, and most changes would be to remove certain unnecessary complexity in the 0-10 version and also to incorporate any feedback from the folks who worked on implementing the 0-10 version.