Toward a Commodity Enterprise Middleware

AMQP was born out of my own experience and frustrations in developing front- and back-office processing systems at investment banks. It seemed to me that we were living in integration Groundhog Day - the same problems of connecting systems together would crop up with depressing regularity. Each time the same discussions about which products to use would happen, and each time the architecture of some system would be curtailed to allow for the fact that the chosen middleware was reassuringly expensive. From 1996 through to 2003 I was waiting for the solution to this obvious requirement to materialize as a standard, and thereby become a commodity. But that failed to happen, and I grew tired of waiting.