ActiveMessaging

ActiveMessaging is an attempt to bring the simplicity and elegance of rails development to the world of messaging. Messaging, (or event-driven architecture) is widely used for enterprise integration, with frameworks such as Java's JMS, and products such as ActiveMQ, Tibco, IBM MQSeries, etc.

ActiveMessaging is a generic framework to ease using messaging, but is not tied to any particular messaging system - in fact, it now has support for Stomp, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Beanstalk, JMS (using StompConnect or direct on JRuby), WebSphere MQ, and the all-Ruby ReliableMessaging.

Here's a sample of a processor class that handles incoming messages:

class HelloWorldProcessor < ActiveMessaging::Processor
  
  subscribes_to :hello_world
  
  def on_message(message)
    puts "received: " + message
  end
  
end

Getting Started

Here are the best beginner guides:

• Installation - get ActiveMessaging, stomp, and activemq
• TenMinuteIntroduction - quick intro on sending and receiving
• UsingActiveMessagingAsGemInRails - how to install ActiveMessaging in Rails as a gem.

Then after you get through that, learn more wih these:

• Configuration - more advanced configuration described
• ExceptionHandling - advice and recipes for better exception handling

ActiveMessaging articles elsewhere

• Processing Pipeline with Amazon S3, SQS, EC2, Ruby, Rails and ActiveMessaging By Philip@AWS, a terrific example of using Amazon SQS with ActiveMessaging for applications that require a large amount of 'heavy-lifting' be handled asynchronously and in a scalable manner on EC2 instances.
• Intro to ActiveMessaging on InfoQ - Still mostly current/complete intro.
• Asynchronous Messaging with Rails - example and explanation of using a13g with AR observers, discussion of a13g as alternative to REST integration.
• Integrating Rails and ActiveMQ with ActiveMessaging/REST - uses ActiveMQ's demo chat app on jetty interacting with a rails app using a13g.
• How to build a mini youtube using activemessaging plugin and amazon s3 - title says it all.
• Publish\Subscribe Messaging with Flex and Rails using Apache ActiveMQ, ActiveMessaging, and STOMP - very cool example of using flex to communicate via stomp.

Developers

Source code is available via subversion here on google code:

svn checkout http://activemessaging.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ activemessaging

Support

Best bet is the google groups mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/activemessaging-discuss