AMQP back in the radar...

Just learned that Microsoft has joined up with AMQP. This is great news - I was playing with AMQP some time ago but in recent months I got a feeling that there was a lot of sitting on the fence about whether people are going to take up on it or not. There's nothing so sad as taking a great idea with a well thought out standard and seeing it get a lack-lustre take-up. This is just the kind of injection AMQP needed.

As I recall, Apache Camel already has support for AMQP, so that'll be a very nice bridging tool for organizations who want to migrate piecemeal towards an AMQP-based infrastructure.

It'll be nice to see what the full extend of Microsoft's participation will be: are they going to buy in wholesale or are they going to just look nice in the background of wedding photographs, enjoying the party? Will they be actively implementing AMQP brokers, or will they just add some AMQP connectivity options to their existing integration offerings?

Things are getting interesting again for AMQP :)

Sneak Preview: my FUSE ESB / ServiceMix screencasts...

Over the last few weeks I've worked on putting some screen casts together on how to get "over the hump" with ServiceMix: you've read all about it, you've downloaded it, and then you wonder: where do I start?

In the screen casts, I show:

Three things to make you more productive with ServceMix - see how to set up your development environment to get stuff done faster.

How to create a simple flow - from file pickup to JMS queue.

How to XSLT transform file data and place on a JMS queue using a pipeline EIP.

The screencasts aren't long, 8, 25 & 19 minutes respectively. Use the streamed video below to get an idea of what's going on in the screen casts: if you like them, then let me know and I'll send an FTP link to where you can download the full resolution 800x600 quick-time movies.

Three things to make you more productive with ServceMix

How to create a simple flow - from file pickup to JMS queue

How to XSLT transform file data and place on a JMS queue using a pipeline EIP

FUSE TV: Andy Warhol may have been right...

Didn't Warhol say something about in the future everyone will have 15 minutes of fame? I, along with some of my Progress colleagues, have been recorded for FUSE TV. My own slot is 13m 13s, which means that I may have only 1m 47s left. Hmmmm... better use those precious seconds sparingly...

m2eclipse: developing with ServiceMix / FUSE archetypes has never been so easy

Hurrah for Cool Tooling!

Maven archetypes are great: anyone developing with ServiceMix will know and appreciate good archetypes, but will probably grumble disapprovingly at the long command lines they entail. In ServiceMix, the smx-arch command-line short-cut made things easier, but I was always uncomfortable with having to swich from Eclipse to the command-line to create my new projects.

In the last few days, Guillaume Nodet put in a tiny little script onto the FUSE repository (http://repo.open.iona.com/maven2) that generates an archetypes-catalog.xml file containing all the archetypes. You can import this URL into m2eclipse, and then use the really neat m2eclipse dialogs to create your maven/eclipse projects directly from the catalog.

I love it so much I added an entry on the FUSE wiki; go there for more details!

Carpe springem - community to the rescue?

I was following a trail on the CXF users list, when Dan Kulp introduced "FreeSpring" (http://www.freespring.org), a community-based effort that has come about to alleviate the effects of the new SpringSource licensing system. Their aim is to solve three key problems for Spring users who do not want to pay SpringSource subscriptions for fixes after the three-month post-release dust-settling period: creating versioned binary distributions, applying community fixes, and, importantly, providing distributions through maven.

I admire the initiative, but was of course keen to find out how freespring.org plan to keep the lights on... their intent is to get some corporate backing from benevolent organisations (perhaps SpringSource competitors?) and also to sell advertising space. I think the latter may be a go-er: freespring.org has the opportunity to become a hub for open-minded Java developers.