Hi Jared,
I am with PROGRESS now for 8 years and have spent 7 as consultant /
architect
with Sonic and the last year intensively with ActiveMQ.
I will not go as far as to say that SonicMQ is bug free and wouldn't
do that for ActiveMQ either.
This having said, my impression is that ActiveMQ and SonicMQ have
different histories.
Sonic was concerned with enterprise features since the very beginning
and has evolved over the last 10
years or so. Despite it's age it has added features like fault
tolerance late in its life. I think this is due to
the fact that as a commercial product it must take version
compatibility very seriously and introducing
a feature like fault tolerance is important, but not easy to achieve
while keeping that compatibility.
Software vendors like PROGRESS for Sonic do have a test bed (in the
case of Sonic a quite sophisticated
lab) that is constantly used for testing large scale deployments (in
case of Sonic a couple of thousand
messaging nodes).
This having said, the open source community is different. For one
thing all bugs are out in the open.
That is a good thing. You can go out and find out if you are the only
person in the world not being able to
use a certain feature ;). Software vendors really hate publishing
their bugs as this is bad PR. I have never
seen a sales slides for Sonic mentioning any bug at all... So I would
agree, that it is a different kind of
visibility there.
This having said, the tests for ActiveMQ as such are more or less
around JUnit tests and targeted at
automatic execution within a continuos build environment. This kind of
implies that distributed tests
are hard to achieve. Companies like PROGRESS with the FUSE version of
the Apache release
kind of jump into that gap. We reuse the lab facilities to do more
sophisticated testing and as such harden
ActiveMQ for large deployments.
As you may have seen in the news PROGRESS has purchased IONA (the guys
originally behind FUSE)
in September 2008, so reusing the PROGRESS labs for Open Source
testing is not quite complete,
but it's getting better day by day ;)
Please note that these lines are my personal view on it and don't
express official Apache or PROGRESS
statements.
Best regards
Andreas
On Apr 7, 2009, at 1:52 AM, Jared Dunne wrote:
messages
---
Mit freundlichen Grüssen - Kind Regards
Andreas Gies
Principal Consultant
Open Source Center of Competence
Progress Software GmbH
Agrippinawerft 26
50678 Köln
E-Mail ag...@progress.com
Direct Line +49 (0)9953 980349
Mobile +49 (0)170 5759611
Skype +44 (0)20 3239 2922
Skype +353 (0)1 443 4971
Skype +1 (0)781 262 0168
http://www.progress.com
http://fusesource.com
http://open-source-adventures.blogspot.com
-------------------------------------------------------
Progress Software GmbH
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Agrippinawerft 26, 50678 Koeln;
Niederlassung: Fuerstenrieder Str. 279, 81377 Muenchen
Amtsgericht Koeln, HRB 15620;
Geschaeftsfuehrung: David Ireland
-------------------------------------------------------
