WebSocket technology is catching up, but it will take a while before all browsers support it. In the meantime there are loads of projects that aim to substitute for WebSockets and enable 'realtime' capabilities for web apps. But all attempts solve only a part of the general problem, and there isn't any single solution that works, is scalable and doesn't require special deployment tricks.

While the firehose is quite a cool feature, I always thought that it was a shame we didn't have a simple GUI to go on top and make it accessible to system administrators. So I wrote one. You can download it here.

We are very pleased to announce the availability in beta of RabbitMQ as a Heroku add-on. With our RabbitMQ service on CloudFoundry, this extends our commitment to supporting the community of cloud application developers.

We believe that cloud messaging is fundamental in two senses. First as a core capability to build applications that scale to cloud use cases as explained in our blog post launching RabbitMQ on CloudFoundry. And second, because messaging can be extended to solve common problems like integration and data push. For example: to connect traditional on-premise applications with virtualized and cloud deployments.

The idea of 'realtime web' or messaging using web browsers has been around for quite some time. First it was called 'long-polling', then 'Comet', the latest incarnation is named 'WebSockets'. Without doubt it's going in a good direction, WebSockets is a neat technology.

But during the fight for realtime capabilities we've lost focus on what is really important how to actually use messaging. In the web context everything is request-response driven and marrying a typical web stack to asynchronous messaging isn't easy.

Recently we launched a RabbitMQ service for Cloud Foundry, making it simple to spin up a message broker to use with your apps on Cloud Foundry. There are tutorials online for using it with Ruby on Rails and with Java apps using Spring. Here we are going to look at using the RabbitMQ service with Node.JS apps.

Today we launched a RabbitMQ service on CloudFoundry.com. This service brings the messaging functionality of RabbitMQ to developers building applications on Cloud Foundry. You can read the main announcement over on the Cloud Foundry blog. There's also an FAQ with more details on the Cloud Foundry knowledge base.  CloudFoundry.com is a free beta service.  So please register there (if you haven't already), then take a look at the RabbitMQ service, try out the sample apps, and write your own.  And tell us how to make it better.

I fundamentally disagree with the APIs exposed by our current AMQP client libraries.

There is a reason why they're imperfect: we intentionally avoided innovation in APIs since the beginning. The purpose of our client libraries is to expose generic AMQP, not any one view of messaging. But, in my opinion, trying to map AMQP directly to client libraries APIs is just wrong and results in over-complication and abstractions hard to use.

There is no common ground: the client libraries blindly following AMQP model will be complex; easy to use client libraries must to be opinionated.

Recently I saw a tweet saying "ZeroMQ Erlangizes everything!" or some such. While I realise that not everything posted on the web is meant seriously, it does seem there is a stream of similar claims lately that ought to be dammed.

In the article Multi-threading Magic[^1], Pieter Hintjens and Martin Sustrik persuasively explain why concurrency is better served by message-passing than by locks and shared memory. And they are fair, I think, in their analysis -- except for the insinuation that using ZeroMQ transforms your chosen programming language into a domestic Erlang.

Note: this blog post talks about the federation plugin preview that was released for RabbitMQ 2.5.0. If you're using 2.6.0 or later, federation is part of the main release; get it the same way you would any other plugin.

Another day, another new plugin release 😃 Today it's federation. If you want to skip this post and just download the plugin, go here. The detailed instructions are here.

The high level goal of federation is to scale out publish / subscribe messaging across WANs and administrative domains.

To do this we introduce the concept of the federation exchange. A federation exchange acts like a normal exchange of a given type (it can emulate the routing logic of any installed exchange type), but also knows how to connect to upstream exchanges (which might in turn themselves be federation exchanges).

The RabbitMQ team is delighted to announce the release of RabbitMQ 2.5.0.