What qualities should a developer/architect look for when evaluating message queues?

Question

In the Java world, there are a few more choices for message queues, but in .Net, there are only a few. When evaluating which one to use, what are some characteristics one should look for? What are the fundamental concepts that make up a reliable message queueing system?

Answer 1

If its an open source message queue then I'd always pick the one with the biggest community behind it so you know your investment won't be wasted. Also pseudo open source projects where its really just one small company contributing might be avoided due to risk (e.g. whats stopping the company going bust or contributing to something else?). For example Apache ActiveMQ has a massive community being one of the most active at Apache while having multiple companies offering support and services.

If its commercial or open source then you need to make sure it supports whatever your system requirements are such as: connectivity via different clients, throughput, latency, scalability, persistence, performance, clustering, HA & reliability. Then bonus points if its very easy to use both for developers and in testing & production.