OpenMQ, the untold story




Every OpenMQ customer I’ve met is a happy one. This JMS implementation is now several years old and enjoys a fair number of business critical deployments. Clearly, while the product has been fully open sourced (including HA), it doesn’t yet enjoy a large and vibrant user community.

Wotif.com’s Greg Luck calls OpenMQ Sun’s best kept secret and insisted on presenting OpenMQ at the latest CommunityOne conference. This was a replay of Dave Whitla’s presentation in Sydney, back in March. The corresponding slides are here. Greg’s talk was recorded and is available on ustream.tv‘s GlassFish Channel. The video quality isn’t great, but the sound is good: part 1, part 2.

http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/395463
–
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/395482

In the latest GlassFish production stories, the following use MQ as a key component of their architecture: SNCF, TravelMuse, OKAir, RTL, and of course Wotif.com.

OpenMQ connectivity at this point is Java or C only which could limit MQ’s use in some environments. The performance, stability, availability, and support level on the other hand is why people chose and stick to OpenMQ. As covered in the first part of the Wotif.com case study, while message oriented architectures can be key to a modular development and scalable production they are still often not used.


Update: the OpenMQ team has posted a roadmap. Covers 4.2 and beyond.

Author: alexismp

Google Developer Relations in Paris.

3 thoughts on “OpenMQ, the untold story”

  1. Hello Alexis,
    I’m acutally an happy J2EE architect.
    Indeed, having failed in the establishment of ActiveMQ, I used OpenMQ…
    And this choice was successful !
    For information, I think that OpenMQ is a mature software, the documentation is good and complete (so rare!).
    I used OpenMQ in my critical project to send "specific business cache" (product catalog) accross multiple application servers. (messages are huge 100Mo minimum and update 20 times per hour. ;)
    With a big activity, OpenMQ has never crashed, no memory leak,…
    However, the console is in swing and not "user friendly" why not a web application as ActiveMQ console ?
    Thanks!

  2. Thanks François for this testimonial!
    Out of curiosity,
    – have you interacted with the forums/mailing lists for OpenMQ? Filed bugs/refs?
    – would you be willing to be featured on blogs.oracle.com/story (pretty lightweight process)?
    I’ve forwarded your feedback and comment about the console to the MQ folks.
    thanks again!

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