Poking around InfoQ I discovered an announcement about the Advanced Message Queue Protocol. Its stated goal is to commoditize messaging—again. I have to smack my forehead. The groups behind it are JP Morgan Chase, RedHat, Twist, Iona, Cisco, and others. Apparently they missed the announcement about all of the libraries and servers that already exist for XMPP which cover more platforms than AMQP.

AMQP offers point-to-point, publish/subscribe, and many-to-many messaging. It's a binary protocol which could provide a slight increase in speed over XMPP, but it lacks a standard message body format, presence, and everything else the JSF has pushed out. Not to mention that AMPQ still hasn't reached version 1.0 yet.

We could learn a few things from them, like their requirements. With some advocacy in this space, and by replicating their reliability and queing requirements XMPP could dash John Davies' goal of making AMPQ the dominant messaging protocol by 2011.