Message passing is a much better approach than synchronous HTTP calls. The implementations, however, aren't that great: Problem with ActiveMQ is that it doesn'

Message passing is a much better approach than synchronous HTTP calls. The implementations, however, aren't that great: Problem with ActiveMQ is that it doesn't seem to be handle high load. This isn't a JMS issue per se, just a problem with the ActiveMQ implementation. I'd be hesitant to use a commercial JMS implementation for most projects. Spread is an alternative, but it seems to be too academic to be useful. I've found that it simply fails to work in some situations (doesn't work when you're delivering messages from multiple producers, across multiple subnets to multiple consumers). "Roll your own" seems to the best option (e.g. connecting UNIX domain sockets on two end points with non-blocking TCP or where appropriate UDP between them).