Benefits of Commercial Messaging Middleware vs Open Source

Question

I've been evaluating several opensource message queue technologies, such as RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, OpenAMQ, etc. My question is, what benefits are gained by using a commercial technology such as Tibco EMS, WebSphereMQ, Sonic, etc. instead of something like Active or Rabbit? PHP will be the primary language involved, although Java systems will be interacting as well.

Answer 1

There are great communities around projects like RabbitMQ (check out the mailing list for example). Also, if cost is an issue, obviously open source is a win there.

Answer 2

I'd say the benefits are few and far between. You really need to be sure that a commercial system is for you before you invest as there is likely to be no going back.

Some of these things are so esoteric, so prone to vendor lock-in, so damn heavyweight that you'll feel like you have a gorilla on your back, not just a monkey ;)

Answer 3

Those commercial technologies are good, but investment in them can be steep. Both yearly license costs and on-going support costs must be considered when making a decision. As far as vendor lock-in goes, in the commercial world there's only one vendor offering support for a given product. In the open source world, there's typically more than one vendor offering support. Consider ActiveMQ for example. Both Progress Software and SpringSource offer support agreements for ActiveMQ as well as some others.

Also, in the commercial world, you won't ever get to look a the source code yourself. For a product like ActiveMQ, anyone can grab the source code. This is pretty powerful because it means that you can add features, etc. and quite possibly get them added to the product.

ActiveMQ has a great community and is very widely deployed. ActiveMQ provides client APIs for many languages including C/C++, Java, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and more.

Bruce

Answer 4

I think its always best to thoroughly examine your requirements before choosing a messaging system:

• Not all the commercial vendors will support PHP for example. ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ will.
• Not all the messaging systems can support very large Queue sizes - though ActiveMQ does
• Not all the messaging systems survive a hard broker stop without loosing messages ActiveMQ will - without you having to use transactions.

And if you going to use open source - always look at the community - ActiveMQ is the most active community of any open source message vendor - and its also Apache - which means diversity and no reliance on any single developer or vendor for delivery.

Answer 5

The biggest difference I have found is operational support and management. The commercial vendors usually provide better tools for ops/support staff to resubmit, edit messages etc.

This is often a weakness of open source offerings, which if rectified, should cause some serious lack of sleep for commercial vendors.