The bank has teamed with Cisco Systems Inc, Iona Technologies Inc, and Red Hat Inc, together with a number of open-source specialists and the Twist non-profit user group, to drive the technology, which was created by JP Morgan but is now controlled by the collective, with plans to submit it to a standards body.
The Working Group, as it refers to itself, has also released a version 0.8 of its spec for the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, AMQP. It hopes that more participants in the enterprise middleware market, whether vendors or users, will provide input and create a head of steam behind the putative standard, helping it move to version 1.0 accompanied by a broader consensus. John O’Hara, the VP and senior architect at JPMorgan whose brainchild it was to begin with, calls it a model for queue-based messaging.
O’Hara clarified in a blog that the standard is NOT controlled by JPMorgan (any more) and copyright is owned by all the contributors, but the license is immediately granted to all in the spec, including any necessary patent rights. This is open to stay open, and cannot be retracted.
Apart from forming the Working Group and releasing the 0.8 spec, the bank and its partners have also thrown down the gauntlet, or at least served notice of changes on the horizon, to two resident heavyweights in the middleware market, IBM Corp and Tibco Software Inc, both of which have very successful proprietary message-orientated middleware products, respectively MQSeries (now WebSphere MQ), and Rendezvous.
O’Hara said that while he does not expect either company to relinquish these crown jewels in the name of an open standard like AMQP, they are free to work towards interoperability with it and we are open to them. The message is that the bank and its partners plan to drive the standard and see it widely adopted, so the proprietary players can remain aloof at their peril.
Furthermore, while he doesn’t expect IBM and Tibco and their respective customer bases to migrate wholesale to AMQP, he said Tibco might be persuaded to adopt it as a basis for a messaging strategy going forward.
The issue the group seeks to address is interoperability. The AMQP initiative derives from the perception that the lack of a standard message-queuing protocol not only leaves the way open for proprietary tie-ins, but also has been an obstacle to the widescale adoption of service-oriented architectures and web services. The analogy O’Hara drew to illustrate where he wants to go with middleware was that of the circuit-switched, fixed-line phone network, into which he said a handset from any manufacturer can be plugged and it will work, communicating with any other vendor’s phone.
The group wants to move from a world in which, O’Hara said, X’s JMS client can talk to Y’s JMS server to one in which a JMS client can talk to an AMQ server, possibly running on a Microsoft platform, or a Cobol client to a Java broker. If all the middleware components are AMQP-compliant, the Working Group says that should be possible.
To achieve interoperability, O’Hara said the group felt a need to fill the gaps in web services and messaging, particularly in terms of wire-level protocols, and wrote a spec of what an app can expect from its middleware. AMQP is a superset of the semantics of Sun’s Java Messaging Service, and while he said JMS can be said to have done a fairly good job at the API level, he said there has been no spec for low-level interoperability, Layers 1-6 of the OSI stack, together with the necessary hooks in Layer 7, the application layer.
This is what JPMorgan wants from AMQP and explains why Cisco, as the bank’s main supplier of networking gear, is among the Working Party’s members. Another is Red Hat, which speaks volumes about the advance of Linux in the financial sector and its progress from back-office functionality to mission-critical environments, including trading floors. Envoy Technologies Inc is an EAI player in the .NET world, iMatix Corp is a Belgian ISV developing open-source architectures and model-oriented programming tools, and 29West Inc is the developer of a high-performance, real-time data distribution and networking platform called Latency Busters Messaging, aimed specifically at financial market messaging. Iona is an Irish EAI vendor that was a major contributor to Corba and web services, presenting them as the underpinning for SOA.
Finally, there is the Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards Team, or Twist, an organization led by the treasury departments of Shell, HP, and GE, and made up of corporate treasurers, fund managers, systems suppliers, electronic trading platforms, market infrastructures, and professional services firms. In its mission statement, it says its primary aim is to close the gaps in the physical and financial supply chain to release the enormous value locked up in disjointed paper-based processes. To achieve this, it says Twist rationalizes financial industry standards by creating user-driven, non-proprietary, and internally consistent XML-based standards for the financial supply chain.
O’Hara was at pains to emphasize that AMQP is designed to be a general-purpose protocol for event notification in business transactions, at high speed and with reliability.
If AMQP is posited as a spec for most common business messaging and a reliable, open, standards-based business transport protocol, the incentive for enterprises to adopt it would be to create a standards-driven market, said O’Hara. With the plumbing standardized, technology adoption and innovation should then be able to accelerate. He said such a market gets a lot bigger, which means increased prosperity.
How IBM, Tibco, and other proprietary MOM vendors will participate in that prosperity, however, remains to be seen. With standards comes commoditization, and people who have been making money with proprietary offerings before they came along must divert their innovative efforts into other parts of the process to continue to prosper. JPMorgan’s own competitors in the financial services industry will need to be convinced that AMQP is truly neutral and that by adopting it they will gain advantages in terms of the freedom to pick and mix middleware components.
IBM’s initial response has been to dismiss the interop issue, arguing that it already has a huge number of connectors into disparate products from other vendors. It further claims that two-thirds of banks in North America and Europe are currently using WebSphere MQ, so a de facto world of interoperability already exists.
This is also not the first attempt at creating an open standard for messaging. Another initiative to enable working with MOM from any language is the Streaming Text Orientated Messaging Protocol, Stomp, project, also known as TTMP. However, Stomp does not attempt to specify message routing behavior inside the broker, leaving it as a black box and concentrating on message transfer between client and server. AMQP is a considerably more complex undertaking, precisely because it does attempt that specification.
