Spouting Shite

A year of hard graft…

After joining StormMQ last year I also joined the AMQP working group. The working group comprises of 23 companies from the finance, IT integration and IT vendor sectors. Since joining I have attended the weekly PMC (project management committee) teleconference, the Marketing SIG (special interest group) and the conference SIG. In addition, I attended three week long Connect-a-Thons in London, Gateshead and Redmond. If all this wasn’t enough, I also took control of the AMQP.org website and most of the infrastructure behind it. It has been a massive time commitment for me…however it has all been worth it.

We are all working together to agree version 1.0 of the AMQP protocol. While I have only recently joined the process, this has been going on for nearly 5 years and originally spear headed by John O’Hara. The group has grown to include people from JPMC, Microsoft, INETCO and many more companies. We are working together with a target to ratify the 1.0 version of the protocol before our conference on the 12^th October 2011.

Once the working group ratifies the 1.0 protocol we plan to move this protocol to the OASIS standards organisation so that we can have the protocol recorded as a proper technical standard. This process will take around 12 months and today we took a rather significant step towards this goal by officially opening our OASIS Steering Committee and our OASIS Member Section. Like a turkey voting for Christmas I was nominated and accepted the position of Treasurer.

The next year will involve more committee meetings and hundreds of teleconferences…however…the goal is important. The MQ community has asked for an end to the virtual monopoly that IBM and TIBCO have held over the market. AMQP will give this community an open, reliable and interoperable standard. A worthy goal.