RabbitMQ/AMQP OSGi Integration

I had a chance to meet up with Neil Bartlett today, and got to talk to him about his RabbitMQ OSGi integation (note that I believe that everything he's done thus far is actually applicable to anyone using an AMQP broker that is compatible with the RabbitMQ Java client, so I'm treating it as a generic AMQP/OSGi module). While it's a work in progress, it's incredibly cool. It allows you to:

• Declare production/consumption parameters (exchanges, queues, hosts, credentials) in a declarative way;
• Have your OSGi container connect the dots so that your declarative bundles automatically match up with concrete connections to your AMQP broker of choice;
• (If you're using Equinox) Use the OSGi shell to interact with the RabbitMQ/AMQP client library.

The first two parts were the types of things that I had worked on in the past (having a declarative way to specify messaging endpoints, down to the broker connectivity level) so that you could change them at execution-time. The third was the real WOW-worthy point.

Assume that you're coding against an OSGi runtime. Assume that you're working with bundles, and dynamically loading and unloading them as you're compiling your code (meaning that you're probably at an osgi> prompt). Assume that want to see very quickly whether your code is interacting properly. Now you can easily setup your bindings and publish and consume messages as your real code is in flight, and see the effects in your debugger.

How amazing is that? Imagine the human cycles that you'll save being able to do all this from one area, that you're already familiar with?!?!

This is a work in progress, and hopefully Ben Hood and I had a chance to give him some places to go from here, but I think this is exactly what the promise of AMQP offers: the chance to do amazing things based on not having to support a million different client libraries, but to code against a standard and make great stuff happen.

If you're using the RabbitMQ Java Client and any type of OSGi container, I highly encourage you to take a look at this and get involved. I see great things happening here.