STOMP

I started something in motion today at work. A thing that may revolutionize inter-departmental communciation. I am urging the Perl/Ruby hackers at my work to get involved with my Smix/Amq habit. They will be doing so using the Perl or Ruby client for STOMP. STOMP is a very simple protocol for doing messaging. When I say simple I mean it. Look at the code for the Ruby client. AMQ, my favorite implementation of the Java Messaging Service (JMS), offers an adapter so that you may handle STOMP messaging clients. SWEET!!!

So what does that mean for me? Well those web guys are Perl/Ruby/PHP masters but don't like the idea of getting their feet wet with Java. I wrote up some super simple Ruby scripts for doing STOMP messaging with AMQ. One pair of scripts reads and writes messages from/to a topic respectively. The other pair of scripts reads and writes message from/to a queue respectively. Publishing and consuming of messages happened very quickly. I'm hoping we can get some measurements soon.

I showcased this stuff to one of the top web programmer guys. I don't know if he was wow'ed but he seems excited to start playing with it. I also got him to install the Java 1.5 SDK on his windows machine. He needs it so that he can use jconsole to monitor messaging in AMQ. Jconsole is bundled with the SDK, and is used to access JMX enabled apps. JMX stands for Java Management Extensions. It's pretty nice to see exactly whats going on with your messaging service.

I'm pretty excited. This should make working with the web team much easier. In the past my department has used flat files and web services to communicate. This will add an extra way for our processes to communicate.