Announcement: Stepping down as project lead

As of today I'll be stepping down as project lead for the HornetQ project.

This has been a really hard decision for me to make, after all, HornetQ is my baby, and I've invested a lot of mental as well as emotional effort in getting it to where it is today.

The last four years have been really tough. Creating a world class messaging system with a tiny team is a formidable job. But getting this far has taken it's toll on me, and I need to step aside and take a rest for a while.

So what am I going to do next? Not really sure yet, but I'll be taking it easy on sabbatical from Red Hat until the beginning of next year when things should be more clear.

Where does HornetQ go from here? The future is bright for HornetQ. It's the default messaging provider in JBoss AS 6 and 7, and will shortly be available supported in JBoss EAP.

I truly believe HornetQ has the potential to be the world's #1 messaging system. We already know it has the best performance, and now we're rounding off the last few features so we can really position ourselves as a true enterprise class messaging system to go against, and win against any system in the market.

The future is bright :)

This brings me to....

I'd also like to announce that Clebert Suconic will be taking over my role as HornetQ project lead :)

Congratulations Clebert!

Clebert is a nice guy and a talented engineer and knows HornetQ back to front having worked on it from the beginning. HornetQ can't be in better hands than Clebert's.

So, I bid you farewell, and happy messaging!

Tim Fox

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HornetQ - the Performance Leader in Enterprise Messaging

We have just published a report that compares the throughput performance of the majority of the enterprise messaging market, and HornetQ comes out as #1 :) In fact, in several uses cases we pretty much destroy the competition. Read the full report

HornetQ 2.1.2 Released

We have just released 2.1.2, which contains basically bug fixes and a couple improvements.

The main work done at this release was making sure compacting and the journal is working fine.

The twitter bridge was also made through this release, thanks to our contributor Tomohisa Igarashi.

Case Study - How Last.fm Uses HornetQ for Their Streaming Infrastructure

We have published a case study about last.fm's use of HornetQ in their infrastructure.

If some of our users have success stories or case studies about HornetQ they want to share, please let us know.

New Stuff on HornetQ 2.1 Final

HornetQ 2.0 was already fast as mentioned before. And still we have done significant performance improvements on this release.

As a matter of fact, if you are doing light weight message sends you have the option of batching multiple sends and using more of your network resources.

We have also added Stomp to our list of native protocols.

As well the possibility of using WebSockets at the browser

We love what we do, HornetQ is already a very strong messaging server, our performance is astonishing and we are full speed ahead on bringing even more improvements on 2.2

Full speed ahead on 2.2 now!

HornetQ 2.1.0.Final

I'm glad to announce that HornetQ 2.1.0 is now Final. http://www.jboss.org/hornetq/downloads.html

HornetQ 2.1.0.CR1 is released

We are glad to announce that we just released 2.1.0.CR1.

Look at the release notes for a complete list of changes:

https://jira.jboss.org/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=12310830&version=12314884

Also, if you speak chinese, there's now a Chinese Version for the documentation:

http://www.jboss.org/hornetq/chinesedocs.html

Turbo messaging in JBoss AS 6.0 M3 thanks to HornetQ

We are glad to announce that HornetQ is now the default (built-in) JMS provider in JBoss AS 6, which has just been released.

We have done many tests to make sure JEE users will be happy with HornetQ in JBoss AS. We believe these are the main benefits for AS users:

- Native IO on Linux

All the HornetQ data is stored in its journal. JBoss AS 6 now bundles the native HornetQ AIO library for Linux users.

Don't worry if you don't use Linux though. HornetQ is still *extremely* fast on Windows, Solaris and other platforms.

- Deployers.

We have integrated HornetQ with the application server deployers. You can have your enterprise application (WAR, EAR.. etc) containing HornetQ deployment descriptors in simple config files which is much simpler than the old formats used by JBoss Messaging and JBoss MQ.

- Administration

We have integrated the JBoss AS admin console with HornetQ. If you don't like XML at all, just use the administrator to maintain your destinations. Simple as click-click

- Enhancements

We have made several enhancements to HornetQ during the release of the JBoss Application Server. HornetQ was already fast before as proven by SpecJMS; an industry standard benchmark yet we have made lots of enhancements. Look at the release notes for more information.

Web Sockets Support For HornetQ

Web Sockets support has landed in HornetQ trunk and will be available in 2.1.0 release to allow Web browsers to directly exchange messages with HornetQ servers.

See this article for a thorough description of the feature.

With HornetQ 2.0.0, you could send and receive messages from Java applications.
With upcoming 2.1.0 release, we expand it to any environment with a Stomp client and from Web browsers with Web Sockets support.

Enjoy!

Want to see HornetQ at JUDCon 2010?

If you want to hear a very cool presentation on HornetQ by Diego Naya at JBoss JUDCon 2010, then you can vote for it here! The top voted for presentations will form the third track at the conference.

Free webinar on HornetQ

The guys at roklee are hosting a free webinar on migration from ActiveMQ to HornetQ. Sign up here

Want to work full-time on HornetQ?

Rocklee labs, are currently looking to hire a Java senior developer to work full time on the HornetQ project as a community contribution. So.... work full time on a cutting edge open source project AND get paid for it. Doesn't get much better than that

Nice post on ActiveMQ-->HornetQ migration

Roklee, has posted a nice article on a migration from ActiveMQ to HornetQ

Introduction to HornetQ article on DZone

If implementing STOMP and websockets support is not enough, Jeff has also found time to write a nice introductory article on HornetQ which is published on Dzone :)

STOMP support and very cool stuff with Web sockets

Thanks to the work of Jeff Mesnil, HornetQ TRUNK now supports the STOMP protocol natively (that means without having to use StompConnect).

If you're not aware of it, STOMP is a simple, interoperable text based messaging protocol, originally implemented by the ActiveMQ guys.

Sure, it doesn't have some of the features that you'll find in more complex protocols but in many applications it's really good enough.

The great thing about STOMP too is that there are already many STOMP clients available in many different languages, this immediately opens up HornetQ to be accessed by clients in .NET, Python, Ruby etc.

The HornetQ server simultaneous supports all its protocols, so you can, e.g. send a JMS message and consume it as a STOMP message and vice versa, going ahead the same will be true with AMQP.

If STOMP support is not cool enough already, Jeff has done some very cool stuff with web sockets and STOMP.

Jeff has written a simple Javascript library which can speak the STOMP protocol, combine this with web sockets and you can now have your in-browser JavaScript apps talking directly to the HornetQ server.

Jeff demonstrated a very simple prototype with a simple JavaScript chat application that consumed messages from and sent messages to a topic on HornetQ.

Web sockets are new technology so aren't currently available in all browsers, but going ahead this is something that should be much more widely available.

Very cool stuff, and all of this will be available in the up coming 2.1 release :)

HornetQ reaches 800K messages / sec on a commodity server

I've been hacking away here, and managed to get a throughput of 800K small non persistent messages per second on a single 4 x 2.5GHz core server. The server was only running at 80% utilisation at this point. That means not even one core used :) Now... I just need to think of a way to incorporate this in a non hacky way.....

JBoss HornetQ sets record SPECjms2007 benchmark results

HornetQ- the new ultra high performance enterprise grade messaging system from JBoss, sets a record breaking score in the SPECjms2007 industry standard benchmark for JMS messaging system performance.

HornetQ 2.0.GA obtained scores up to 307% higher than previously published SPECjms2007 benchmark results, on the same server hardware and operating system set-up.

The peer-reviewed results are available on the spec.org web-site: http://www.spec.org/jms2007/results/jms2007.html

The results were obtained by Kai Sachs and Stefan Appel from an independent research group at the TU Darmstadt, Germany.

Their release announcement can be found here:

http://www.dvs.tu-darmstadt.de/news/specjms2007Results_HornetQ.html

Work is currently occurring on HornetQ 2.1 which includes another round of enhancements to take performance to yet another level.

For more information on HornetQ, please see the web site http://hornetq.org

SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECjms2007® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. The results used in the above comparison refer to submissions made on the 17 Sep 2009 and 20 Jan 2010 by TU University Darmstadt

DZone interviews Tim Fox on HornetQ

DZone presents a short interview on the past, present and future of HornetQ

Using Stomp With HornetQ 2.0.0

The next release of HornetQ will have native support for Stomp but it already possible to use Stomp with HornetQ 2.0.0 thanks to StompConnect.

I wrote a simple example to show how to configure HornetQ and StompConnect to provide a fully functional Stomp messaging server.

The example code is hosted on GitHub:

git clone git://github.com/jmesnil/hornetq-stomp.git

Enjoy!

HornetQ 2.0.0.GA is released!

Red Hat Middleware (JBoss) is pleased to announce the release of HornetQ 2.0 GA.

HornetQ is an open source community project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, ultra high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system.

HornetQ can be used to provide messaging functionality from the smallest of applications to empowering the largest of enterprise messaging topologies.

Writing a full-blown, enterprise messaging system is a huge undertaking and it's been a long and windy road to get where we are today. It's taken over 2 years of development and many late nights and weekends to get to this point, but we hope you like what you see.

HornetQ is currently an unsupported community project, but, in the not-too-distant future will be available fully supported by Red Hat as part of a JBoss Enterprise Application Platform subscription. Even sooner than that HornetQ will be available in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a technical preview with limited support.

Here's just a taste of why you should consider choosing, or migrating to HornetQ:

* 100% open source software. HornetQ is licenced using the Apache Software License v2.0 to minimise barriers to adoption.
* Jaw-dropping performance. Our unique high performance journal provides astonishing persistent messaging performance. When running on Linux it takes advantage of native code to provide performance unavailable from pure Java. When Linux is not available it still flies at supersonic speed.
* Full feature set. All the features you'd expect in any serious messaging system, and others you won't find anywhere else.
* Usability is key. We ship with over 75 ready-to-run examples demonstrating most aspects of HornetQ functionality.
* Comprehensive documentation. We ship with a in depth 200 page user manual, and a quickstart guide to get you up and running in minutes.
* Written in Java. Runs on any platform with a Java 5+ runtime, that's everything from Windows desktops to IBM mainframes.
* Elegant, clean-cut design with minimal third party dependencies. Run HornetQ stand-alone, run it in integrated in your favourite JEE application server, or run it embedded inside your own product. The choice is yours.
* Solid high availability. We provide a HA solution with automatic client failover so you can guarantee zero message loss or duplication in event of server failure.
* Hugely flexible clustering. Create clusters of servers that know how to load balance messages. Link geographically distributed clusters over unreliable connections to form a global network that powers your core business. Configure routing of messages in a highly flexible way.

Please see the wiki for a complete list of HornetQ features.

What's next for HornetQ? We have lots of exciting things in store including REST support, AMQP support, STOMP support and direct Ajax/Comet/Web sockets support.

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 blog
Wiki
Download
Documentation
Follow us on twitter
Get your cool HornetQ swag here (T-shirts, mugs etc)

HornetQ 2.0.0.CR3 is released!

We are very close to GA. This release has a just few minor fixes and improvements as it you could be verified at our release notes. You can download it from the HornetQ Web Site.