Difference Between Amps(Advanced Message Processing System) and Jms

I recently came across this post and, as an employee of 60East Technologies, felt that it deserved a more complete response.

If you're asking in terms of "what role in an architecture do these serve", then you're right: both of these fall in the broad category of message-oriented middleware. They're both ways to coordinate and exchange data between processes based on the concept of messages as the units of data exchanged.

JMS is a standard API for Java, and one of the more popular ways of handling messaging. There are multiple implementations from multiple vendors. Since it's a standard, these are all similar in interface and have distinct implementations. Products that support JMS can also support wire standards such as AMQP to provide a level of interoperability for components that aren't written in Java.

AMPS (Advanced Message Processing System) is a bit less widely-known. It's a messaging product developed by 60East Technologies, Inc. Since it's a product rather than a standard, there's one implementation. It's a broker-based system, so in AMPS all message traffic passes through the broker. AMPS supports multiple programming languages (right now, there are clients available for Java, C#/.Net, Python, JavaScript, and C++). AMPS supports a variety of message payload formats (FIX, JSON, XML, Protocol Buffers, MessagePack, etc.). AMPS also supports a few different styles of message delivery: message queues (as JMS does), fan-out publish and subscribe, "query and subscribe" where an application gets current values for a set of records and then receives push updates when the records change, and historical replay ("bookmark subscribe") that exactly replays a stream of messages any number of times. AMPS also provides things like inline message transformation/enrichment, the ability to aggregate messages and project views (similar to the way an RDBMS can project a view of an underlying table).

AMPS was initially designed for very high-volume and low-latency applications (things like crossing engines/crossing networks in the financial sector). AMPS emphasizes performance, and takes a "whole-system" view of performance. That is, performance is considered from the point at which a producer starts to send a message to the point at which a consumer can act on the message, not just with regards to time in the broker.

To sum it up: AMPS is a product rather than a standard, supports multiple programming languages, provides a wide variety of capabilities and beyond message queues, and is designed for very high performance

Ryan

60East Technologies