"While ordinary e-mail settled on standards long ago, its high-end alter ego known as “message oriented middleware” – aka MOM – is still wandering around in the wilderness of proprietary isolation. MOM is what mission critical enterprise apps use to send messages to each other, usually in the same asynchronous style as e-mail... To be sure, these app-to-app messages have much greater business value than your typical person-to-person office missive, and therefore require VIP treatment. That’s why MOMs like IBM’s WebSphere MQ... and Tibco’s Rendezvous pack all kinds of fancy features to guarantee that a message will actually be delivered and that it will only be delivered once.
"...Some big-time MOM users have finally decided they aren’t going to take “no” for an answer anymore, and have banded together with some ambitious open source vendors to put together a new and totally open standard for business messaging called AMQP, short for “Advanced Message Queuing Protocol”."
