Juha, the author of the JBoss XMBean implementation and one of the contributors to the good ole microkernel has decided to join the Messaging team, 100%. This is fantastic news. With these top-class technical brains, Juha Lindfors, Tim Fox and Clebert Suconic, there's nothing stopping us from reaching the goal we're chasing since we started working on Messaging: write the best messaging system there is. There won't be long until 1.2 is released (several months). In case you are curious, here's the situation:

 

Messaging 1.0 series is out there, "rock solid and very fast", to use the exact words of one of our users who has deployed it in production. I did not make this up, I have e-mails to prove it :). We're using the large amount of feedback we're getting on the forums to make it even better, and all improvements are naturally pushed on the trunk, through periodical merging.

 

In what 1.2 is concerned, it is nicely shaping up:

 

Clebert is working hard on failover. We have a prototype in place, and now we're poring over various use cases, making sure that those situations are covered. If you're curious to take a look at his work, there is the branch on which the failover-related developments takes place: http://fisheye.jboss.org/browse/Messaging/branches/Branch_Client_Failover_Experiment. Also, there is a lot of vigorous tech talk on this subject on our design forum. Alpha quality distributed destination support is already in place, thanks to Tim, and when failover is completed, we will have a fully working clustering solution.

 

There was a recent Remoting meeting where Tom Elrod, Scott, Clebert, Ron and myself went over various details related to NIO and framing support integration in Remoting. The result is that, yes, we will have NIO and framing protocol support integrated in Remoting, most likely in its 3.0 release. For now, because of the large numbers of abstractions that have to be taken into consideration, and the fact that Remoting wants to offer a consistent top-level API to all its current "users", we decided to start bottom-up, with a NIO/framing implementation that is currently very Messaging-oriented, and when we get that working, we will gradually migrate it to Remoting.

 

Tim is trying to get 1.2.Alpha2 out for a while now, and he will probably succeed to get that done next week.

 

Ron has finalized HTTP integration, we're preparing to merge his work into the main trunk, and he'll soon start on the multiplex transport. We need to work on improving the multiplex performance, which is not stellar. However, using multiplex instead of the current "two-connections" socket transport will make configuration headaches our users are experiencing in some network topologies go away. We promised to do that for a long time.

 

Conclusion: we're advancing full tilt towards the clustered release. The beta is due end of November, and it's on track, the GA is due next February.

 

Oh, yes, and if there's one thing people in the Valley know, it's... ummm, I actually wanted to say "Enjoy JBoss Messaging!" :)