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 :)