The Hornet Hatches!

This is an exciting day for messaging at JBoss and Red Hat.

After months of preparation, the middleware messaging team are excited to announce the birth of a new project "HornetQ".

What is HornetQ?

HornetQ is an open source project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system. HornetQ is an example of Message Oriented Middleware (MoM)

HornetQ is designed with usability in mind: We've provided an extensive, easy-to-understand user-manual and quick-start guide and we ship with over 65 ready-to-run examples out of the box, demonstrating everything from simple JMS usage to complex clusters of servers and more exotic functionality.

HornetQ is designed with flexibility in mind: It's elegant POJO based design has minimal third party dependencies: Run HornetQ as a stand-alone messaging broker, run it in integrated in your favourite JEE application server, or run it embedded inside your own application. It's up to you.

HornetQ is designed with performance in mind: Our unique ultra-high performance journal provides never seen before persistent messaging performance. Automatically switching into native mode when running on Linux, it uses asynchronous IO to provide persistent messaging rates that can saturate the write throughput of a disk. Our pluggable transport system uses JBoss Netty out of the box to provide superb performance and scalability on the wire.

HornetQ is licensed using the Apache Software License V 2.0. The ASL 2.0 has fewer restrictions on use than the LGPL, thus providing fewer barriers to adoption. We want HornetQ to be used as widely as possible.

HornetQ has a great feature set that you'd expect of any serious messaging broker.

But... What about JBoss Messaging?

During its development over the last couple of years the HornetQ code-base was worked on under the name JBoss Messaging 2.0

We decided to rename it and separate it as an independent project since it differs in a many ways from JBoss Messaging 1.x and we did not want to confuse the two, quite different, systems. The vast majority of the code base of HornetQ is different to the code base of JBoss Messaging 1.x

So, what happens with JBoss Messaging now? JBoss Messaging 1.x continues to be known under the name of JBoss Messaging and the project is now in maintenance mode only, with all new messaging development happening on the HornetQ project.

Let's go!... to the future

The future has a lot to hold.

What about cloud computing?

Messaging is going to be a key service in the cloud, and our goal is for HornetQ to be the messaging provider of choice in the cloud. It's our view that RESTful APIs will eventually be the preferred API style in clouds. With that in mind we'll be working on implementing a RESTful style API for interoperable messaging.

Since interoperability is high on our list we won't just stop with REST. HornetQ will also be implementing AMQP and native STOMP support to make it a truly multi-lingual messaging system.

Get involved. HornetQ needs you!

The future certainly has lots in store, and there is plenty for us to do. So why not get involved?

HornetQ is a community, open source project and we'd love to hear from you if you'd like to get involved in development, documentation or help in some other way. We have a small team so any help would be fantastic. Join us!

Come, hear the scoop!

To get all the details on this exciting news and more and to see how it fits in the with JBoss' and Red Hat's overall middleware strategy, come and see me and others speak at the Red Hat summit / JBoss World 2009 in Chicago on September 1-4.

See you there!

Any questions?

I've put together a FAQ that should answer most of the common questions about HornetQ.

Here are some more links:

Project web site Project wiki Download User manual Quick start guide Follow us on twitter