Which embedded messaging system -> ActiveMQ or HornetQ

Question

I would appreciate some general pointers and opinions regarding which of the two messaging systems is

• easier to manage
• has less gotchas or magic stuff one

Answer 1

I did an extensive evaluation of both before deciding on ActiveMQ. It is proven and stable, something that you want in a messaging system. I have used ActiveMQ on two large scale systems with great success. There was some hype around HornetQ a while back when they claimed to be faster than ActiveMQ so I took a look. HornetQ has some serious flaws with it's clustering which can result in messages being lost and servers trying to indefinitely connect to a failed node. The lead developer on HornetQ refuses to recognize flaws in HornetQ and gets quite defensive on the user forums, something that should make you very wary of the product.