6 ms·

IMatix: AMQP ‘fundamentally flawed’

72 points by zacharyvoase 17y ago

mey 17y ago
I'd love to see a quick diagram of what the protocol's look like on the network and compare them to various other MQ systems and other protocols like HTTP etc.
dtf 17y ago
That's rather damning. As a casual but curious user, I "got" ØMQ and was up and running from a one page tutorial. AMQP left me scratching my head for longer. It didn't seem quite as orthogonally structured. It just wasn't UNIX.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Yep. ZeroMQ kicks ass; blinding fast! But people shouldn't know about two big caveats: 1) It's a messaging library, and not a server. 2) It has no persistence. The lisp binding (cl-zmq) is specially attractive, but I ended up using Redis since I knew it well anyway.
  - stingraycharles 17y ago
    2) It has no persistence. Isn't persistence achieved when you use a Broker architecture, which is supported by ZeroMQ?
- franksalim 17y ago
  I think that is due to OpenAMQ and not AMQP the protocol. sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server will get you a working AMQP server on Debian or Ubuntu in one step. Building from source is fairly easy, as well: http://www.rabbitmq.com/build-server.html http://www.rabbitmq.com/build-server.html
luckyland 17y ago
I recall some long running misunderstanding between iMatix and RedHat and their roles in the working group. Is this fallout from not being able to make that work?
- phintjens 17y ago
  No misunderstandings... When the AMQP working group was founded, RHAT took a very assertive role over AMQP and created versions that no-one else implemented, and which were pushed through the working group by sheer political force. Read the abomination that is the AMQP/0.9 spec, if you have the courage. The determination of RHAT to create incompatible forks of the spec is a large part of what killed AMQP in our eyes. We spent several years trying to save AMQP from that. We failed. We're a small team, RHAT had 20 people working on this.
  - rbranson 17y ago
    Ah, another one bites the dust by the hands of an "enterprise" software vendor. These guys make money selling free software to big companies that are too stupid to realize that their support contract is about as valuable as the paper it's written on.
  - rdtsc 17y ago
    > We're a small team, RHAT had 20 people working on this. They should have realized they already failed when they allocated 20 people just do work on the protocol specification. This is another example of a design by committee done by a large enterprise vendor and how it results in a a bloated, inefficient and overly complicated specification. All 20 people feel the need to justify their time by adding more crap and features to the design. Usually no matter how simple or complicated the actual protocol needs to be, its specification will always be proportional to the number of people * time assigned to work on it.
sliderr 17y ago
"Hey this thing X is broken our new product solves all problems and is superior in any way." While I too would like to see AMQP 1.0 rather sooner than later and despite the open standard there are only a few usable implementations, I doubt that this new and great wire protocol will solve all of AMQPs problems which are located in other areas.
- mahmud 17y ago
  Don't forget that Imatix has a long history of producing top notch infrastructure software. Their code is consistently, tight, fast, and pretty. For anyone who wants to improve their C hacking, I highly recommend the SFL (Imatix's Standard Function Library): purtiest code you have ever seen.
  - phintjens 17y ago
    Very kind of you. SFL is my work.
    - mahmud 17y ago
      My honor :-) Several times in my life I thought of sending an unsolicited resume to you guys, but always doubted I had what it takes.
    - Groxx 17y ago
      I'm quite impressed, and many thanks for the documentation! All in all, a much more readable library than I've ever seen. btw, did you know your documentation [1] has bad links for point_in_rec ? All links I've found link to mem_alloc. http://legacy.imatix.com/html/sfl/ http://legacy.imatix.com/html/sfl/
    - nicolas314 17y ago
      SFL saved my ass in the mid-1990s. I was in dire need of some easy-to-use, well-documented functionalities in C and SFL was easily the best there was. A million thanks for providing such high-quality code to the community!
  - 17y ago
smokinn 17y ago
It would be nice if they pointed out why rather than a simple "this sucks" with no reasoning. I tried getting OpenAMQ up and running about a year ago but it was like pulling teeth. On the other hand, I got RabbitMQ installed and working in almost no time at all so I don't think the AMQP standard is what's getting in the way of building a quality messaging product. 0MQ was still in pre-alpha with nothing available to download at the time so it wasn't even possible to use it. It's nice to see that the project delivered something useful.
joevandyk 17y ago
How's this different than apache mq?
benwerd 17y ago
Hrm. I've been talking through a decentralized social web architecture on my blog, with an eye to building an open source project later on, and had intended to use AMQP as the backbone for reliable message passing. This somewhat puts paid to that. ZeroMQ looks good, but if anyone else has found themselves wanting to shop around, these detailed message queue evaluation notes from the folks at Second Life may be worth a look: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Notes http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Not...
- revoltingx 17y ago
  Absolutely, I'm working on an MMO, and the complexity/flexibility of the AMQP protocol has been a god send. However, I do agree that its concepts are somewhat convoluted for a new user, it took me quite a bit of digging to get the basics of what an exchange/queue was and what bindings mean, etc. However, 0MQ looks attractive but simply doesn't have what's needed for a complex project that spans languages, platforms, and usages beyond the basic pub-sub. I would compare both protocols as XML vs. JSON, whereas XML may be tedious but it's absolutely necessary for some cases, specially where tight specifications are needed.

72 points by zacharyvoase 17y ago

mey 17y ago

I'd love to see a quick diagram of what the protocol's look like on the network and compare them to various other MQ systems and other protocols like HTTP etc.

dtf 17y ago

That's rather damning. As a casual but curious user, I "got" ØMQ and was up and running from a one page tutorial. AMQP left me scratching my head for longer. It didn't seem quite as orthogonally structured. It just wasn't UNIX.

mahmud 17y ago
Yep. ZeroMQ kicks ass; blinding fast! But people shouldn't know about two big caveats: 1) It's a messaging library, and not a server. 2) It has no persistence. The lisp binding (cl-zmq) is specially attractive, but I ended up using Redis since I knew it well anyway.
- stingraycharles 17y ago
  2) It has no persistence. Isn't persistence achieved when you use a Broker architecture, which is supported by ZeroMQ?
franksalim 17y ago
I think that is due to OpenAMQ and not AMQP the protocol. sudo apt-get install rabbitmq-server will get you a working AMQP server on Debian or Ubuntu in one step. Building from source is fairly easy, as well: http://www.rabbitmq.com/build-server.html http://www.rabbitmq.com/build-server.html

luckyland 17y ago

I recall some long running misunderstanding between iMatix and RedHat and their roles in the working group. Is this fallout from not being able to make that work?

phintjens 17y ago
No misunderstandings... When the AMQP working group was founded, RHAT took a very assertive role over AMQP and created versions that no-one else implemented, and which were pushed through the working group by sheer political force. Read the abomination that is the AMQP/0.9 spec, if you have the courage. The determination of RHAT to create incompatible forks of the spec is a large part of what killed AMQP in our eyes. We spent several years trying to save AMQP from that. We failed. We're a small team, RHAT had 20 people working on this.
- rbranson 17y ago
  Ah, another one bites the dust by the hands of an "enterprise" software vendor. These guys make money selling free software to big companies that are too stupid to realize that their support contract is about as valuable as the paper it's written on.
- rdtsc 17y ago
  > We're a small team, RHAT had 20 people working on this. They should have realized they already failed when they allocated 20 people just do work on the protocol specification. This is another example of a design by committee done by a large enterprise vendor and how it results in a a bloated, inefficient and overly complicated specification. All 20 people feel the need to justify their time by adding more crap and features to the design. Usually no matter how simple or complicated the actual protocol needs to be, its specification will always be proportional to the number of people * time assigned to work on it.

sliderr 17y ago

"Hey this thing X is broken our new product solves all problems and is superior in any way." While I too would like to see AMQP 1.0 rather sooner than later and despite the open standard there are only a few usable implementations, I doubt that this new and great wire protocol will solve all of AMQPs problems which are located in other areas.

mahmud 17y ago
Don't forget that Imatix has a long history of producing top notch infrastructure software. Their code is consistently, tight, fast, and pretty. For anyone who wants to improve their C hacking, I highly recommend the SFL (Imatix's Standard Function Library): purtiest code you have ever seen.
- phintjens 17y ago
  Very kind of you. SFL is my work.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    My honor :-) Several times in my life I thought of sending an unsolicited resume to you guys, but always doubted I had what it takes.
  - Groxx 17y ago
    I'm quite impressed, and many thanks for the documentation! All in all, a much more readable library than I've ever seen. btw, did you know your documentation [1] has bad links for point_in_rec ? All links I've found link to mem_alloc. http://legacy.imatix.com/html/sfl/ http://legacy.imatix.com/html/sfl/
  - nicolas314 17y ago
    SFL saved my ass in the mid-1990s. I was in dire need of some easy-to-use, well-documented functionalities in C and SFL was easily the best there was. A million thanks for providing such high-quality code to the community!
- 17y ago

smokinn 17y ago

It would be nice if they pointed out why rather than a simple "this sucks" with no reasoning. I tried getting OpenAMQ up and running about a year ago but it was like pulling teeth. On the other hand, I got RabbitMQ installed and working in almost no time at all so I don't think the AMQP standard is what's getting in the way of building a quality messaging product. 0MQ was still in pre-alpha with nothing available to download at the time so it wasn't even possible to use it. It's nice to see that the project delivered something useful.

joevandyk 17y ago

How's this different than apache mq?

benwerd 17y ago

Hrm. I've been talking through a decentralized social web architecture on my blog, with an eye to building an open source project later on, and had intended to use AMQP as the backbone for reliable message passing. This somewhat puts paid to that. ZeroMQ looks good, but if anyone else has found themselves wanting to shop around, these detailed message queue evaluation notes from the folks at Second Life may be worth a look: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Notes http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Message_Queue_Evaluation_Not...

revoltingx 17y ago
Absolutely, I'm working on an MMO, and the complexity/flexibility of the AMQP protocol has been a god send. However, I do agree that its concepts are somewhat convoluted for a new user, it took me quite a bit of digging to get the basics of what an exchange/queue was and what bindings mean, etc. However, 0MQ looks attractive but simply doesn't have what's needed for a complex project that spans languages, platforms, and usages beyond the basic pub-sub. I would compare both protocols as XML vs. JSON, whereas XML may be tedious but it's absolutely necessary for some cases, specially where tight specifications are needed.