Qpid now a Top-Level Apache Project

  • Article

by Peter Galli on March 09, 2009 04:35pm

In case you missed it, the Apache Software Foundation announced last week that the Qpid project has graduated from the Apache Incubator as a Top-Level Project, which essentially means that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Qpid is an Open Source messaging implementation built on the Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification, and is the first open standard for enterprise messaging.

Qpid provides transaction management, queuing, clustering, federation, security, management, and support across multiple operating systems and platforms, and currently runs critical systems for many users and large organizations.

Microsoft was invited to join the AMQP working group last October by the six founding members. Sam Ramji, the Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft said at that time in a blog post that the company had "committed to participate in the development of the specification and is keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging."

While message-based transports with security and transactional integrity were a vital infrastructure component throughout financial institutions, the AMQP specification and related implementations "may also provide greater interoperability for a number of other vertical scenarios, including insurance and healthcare. AMQP specifies a wire-level protocol (think of a transport like TCP or HTTP) and FIX, FpML, SOAP, and other messages can be sent of AMQP in LAN and WAN environments," Ramji said.

He also stressed that Microsoft's work in AMQP would be consistent with the commitment to openness outlined in July. As the AMQP Working Group required a limited royalty-free patent licensing commitment from its members Microsoft, as a participant, agreed to grant royalty-free patent licenses on specified terms to implementers of the specification.  

"Since joining AMQP.org last year, we have seen how valuable the AMQP specification is to the participating customers. It is great to see the Apache Qpid project maturing as the community strives to address the customer need for choice and improved enterprise-class messaging interoperability," Ramji said last week.