non-Java, Open Source, Message-Oriented Middleware

[Richard Cottrill]

> From: linux-admin at lists.samba.org [mailto:linux-admin at lists.samba.org]On
> Behalf Of Doug.Palmer at csiro.au
> I've been looking for examples of message-oriented middleware (MOM) in the
> open-source world.

Hi,

Non-Java is a sticking point in open-source. I've looked around this area
some and I can't find too much. *IF* you can bend the Java restriction then
OpenJMS looks like a decent option. I'm not too thrilled by it because I
intrinsically dislike store & forward systems for all kinds of reasons - not
the least of which is their inelegance - PGM seems to be a much more elegant
solution IMHO. In terms of plusses - OpenJMS is GPL, dead easy to configure,
and standards-compliant.

TIBCO has abortively released a GPL PGM implementation for Linux (OpenPGM).
There was a code drop due late last year; but I'm not sure it ever
materialised. I tried to check; but the website appears to be down. I'm
going to chase this up.

I've looked at hacking Jabber to be a MOM server as well; and some of the
docs on the Jabber site suggest that it is one of the goals of the server.
Unfortunately I found Jabber a pain to configure and decided I wasn't
motivated enough. I was specifically looking at bolting OpenPGM onto the
Jabber server for inter-server messaging (thus enabling 1-M communication in
that way that I think all MOM systems should).

Not to be rude; but I couldn't find anything in the open-source universe
that was as featureful as Talarian SmartPGM and SmartSockets - truly
spectacular stuff. Talarian gave us (my colleagues and I) a presentation on
it and we were agape at some of the things they can do. I sincerely hope you
can find something to compete effectively - TIBCO and Talarian both charge
through the nose (an average implementation can easily run to US$500k +
consulting services - many contracts are more than double that).

If want to try something evil; you could build some stored procedures and
use MySQL. Off the top of my head I don't know why it's intrinsically so
much worse than other store-forward systems... There might be a way to put
your tables into /tmp to keep everything in memory (if you don't need
persistence). Actually, that might have legs... Suggestions about why this
is such a bad idea anyone?

Richard

*Disclaimer*: I work in product support for TIBCO software. TIBCO recently
bought Talarian; ergo I may support Talarian software in future. I believe
Andreas is the only person on this list to suffer my professional wrath ;)