October 09, 2017 / by Sean Michael Kerner / In news

Linux Foundation Launches OpenMessaging Project

The roster of Linux Foundation Collaborative Project is growing again, this time with the launch of OpenMessaging project.

According to the project’s GitHub projec page, the goal of the effort is to provide a vendor-neutral open standard for distributed messaging and stream.

“OpenMessaging, which includes the establishment of industry guidelines and messaging, streaming specifications to provide a common framework for finance, e-commerce, IoT and big-data area,” the project states. “The design principles are the cloud-oriented, simplicity, flexibility, and language independent in distributed heterogeneous environments.

There are many different messaging standards and protocols in use today, but when it cam time for Chinese internet giant Alibaba to figure out how to enable messaging across its platform, existing solutions didn’t quite fit the bill.

Von Gosling, senior architect at Alibaba, co-creator of Apache RocketMQ, and original initiator of OpenMessaging stated that Alibaba has been working in the messaging and streaming field for years and explored Corba notifications, JMS and other standards to try to solve business requirements.

“After evaluating the available alternatives, Alibaba chose to create a new cloud-oriented messaging standard, OpenMessaging, which is a vendor-neutral and language-independent and provides industrial guidelines for areas like finance, e-commerce, IoT, and big data,” Von Gosling stated. “Moreover, it aims to develop messaging and streaming applications across heterogeneous systems and platforms.”

Von Gosling added that with the OpenMessaging Project at the Linux Foundation the hope is build an open, simple, scalable, and interoperable platform that benefits from contributions. Among the vendors that is joining OpenMessaging is Verizon’s Oath business unit which includes the operations of AOL and Yahoo. Coincidentally, Oath recently announced that it was discontinuing its consumer AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) platform.

“Oath–a Verizon subsidiary of leading media and tech brands including Yahoo and AOL– supports open, collaborative initiatives and is glad to join the OpenMessaging project.” — Joe Francis, director, Core Platforms at Oath stated.

OpenMessaging is still a very early effort with the current domain architecture at the 0.1 alpha milestone release.

News Source: Linux Foundation Launches OpenMessaging Project