What was it, you ask, that finally drew me back to my blog (well, one of them, anyway)? Has my muse compelled me to write on matters of National importance? Have I been moved to the pen by some bowel-clenching happenstance?
No.
By smugness.
Tawdry my motives may be, but they are real, at least. And so, to the tale:
I’ve long been a fan/zealot/proselytizer of (almost) all things Open Sourcey and I’m always on the lookout for examples of where Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) succeeds over or fails against it’s proprietary cousins. We’re embarking on a rather large software build at work, the code of which requires and asynchronous messaging queue (basically, something that keeps a stack of incoming messages or requests until another process can handle them sometime later). Being the kind of place it is, work has thrown it’s weight behind using the Microsoft Messaging Queue (MSMQ), and, not knowing one end of a messaging queue from my elbow, I wondered if a novice such as myself would have any luck in finding a suitable FLOSS equivalent. The spur to action was actually a comment by a colleague: “That contractor we’ve got has already got a little messaging queue set up on his PC and he can send message back and forth already, after just a day!”
Well, I’m pleased (a.k.a. smug) to say that after an hour-and-a-half, I’d located 5 different messaging queue systems (6 if you include the one that comes built-in with Linux), selected one (ActiveMQ) of the two that easily integrated with C #, installed it and the Spring .NET assembly, copied the listener/sender code out of a very clear article on the subject, and had the lot happy and running! So Mr. Microsofty guy wasn’t that clever after all, and FLOSS has something off-the-shelf that’s (probably) as good as MSMQ, supports most major messaging protocols, can be called using C#, and is a doddle to set up.
So: don’t forget to FLOSS whenever you can!