I chatted with David and Brian this afternoon. And I mentioned something that good marketers do all the time: They have the ability to speak enthusiastically about their product, repeated thousands of times. And every time, they speak as if its the first time. Ordinary people, on the other hand, don't tend to repeat what they thought they already said, thinking, "I've said that a month ago, they should have know it by now."
The truth is that people won't remember it. And you have to say something again and again to get people to absorb it. And in that spirit, I'll follow up on a few of my past posts.
The post was made about six weeks after InfoQ's launch. I said I'll make it part of my Firefox home pages. I did indeed. And I'm happy to say that I'm not disappointed. Here's my repeated recommendation:
AMQP is a on-the-wire queue-based messaging protocol/model specification backed by a few companies, including Red Hat, 29West and IONA.
The two seemingly unrelated story converged into one, when IONA announced the availability of their new open source product Celtix Enterprise ESB five days ago. It includes multiple Apache (including incubator) and other open source projects such as CXF, ActiveMQ, Eclipse SOA Tools. It also includes Qpid, an Apache incubator project that implements the AMQP specification.
For some reason, the press release was not very clear about the actual licensing terms. I have to prod a little on InfoQ's news item about it, and download and install the product, to get a fuller picture. It's basically Apache License 2.0. IONA will offer consulting, training and support (subscriptions) for the open source product.
Well, I did not actually write these entries at the time, but I should have.
What happened was this. We ordered Indian food for an OCI internal event. The food arrived a few hours early, and we debated whether we should put the food (fresh out of the kitchen hot) into the refrigerator. Jonathan said yes, and I said no. Somehow or rather the topic shifted to "How long will a piece of pizza last?"
It just so happened that the next day, we had a OCI internal Java (or C++) lunch and had some leftover pizza. I took a piece (Papa John's Pepperoni), put it in a paper plate, wrote "Science Experiment, Starting Date: 2006/03/27" on the plate, and placed it in a corner of my desk. I told everyone, "It will last at least a month." Others were skeptical.
Imagine the fun we had during that month.
Oops, it's late and I've got to go to bed. I'll tell you about the dramatic conclusion of the experiment some other time. (Or leave a comment with your speculative conclusion.)