Tim Fox started work on HornetQ in 2007 as JBoss Messaging 2.0. After 2 years of effort, Fox realised the original JBoss Messaging codebase had been almost completely rewritten and it was decided to release it under a different name. Fox came up with the name "HornetQ". On 24 Aug 2009 HornetQ 1.0 was launched. In September 2010 Fox released the results of a set of benchmarks comparing HornetQ performance with other popular messaging systems. Fox led the project until October 2010, when he stepped down as project lead to pursue other projects. It is currently led by Clebert Suconic with core engineers Andy Taylor, Francisco Borges, Howard Gao and Jeff Mesnil.
HornetQ Apache donation and Apache Artemis 1.0.0 release
The HornetQ code base was donated to the Apache ActiveMQ community late last year and now resides as a sub project under the ActiveMQ umbrella named Apache ActiveMQ Artemis. Since the code donation, the developers have been working tirelessly to get an initial release of Artemis out the door; to allow folks to give it a whirl and to finalise the donation process. With the release of Apache Artemis 1.0.0, that process has come to a close and the code donation has now been completed. The active developer community has migrated across to Artemis; all of the developers that were active on HornetQ are now committers to the Artemis project; working on the code base as part of the ActiveMQ umbrella. The hope is that the union of the two great communities HornetQ and ActiveMQ will provide a path for a next generation of message broker with more advanced features, better performance and greater stability. The community hopes to achieve these goals using the Artemis core with its superior performance in combination with the vast feature offering of ActiveMQ. The Artemis project is targeted to house this next generation of message broker, as such any new feature requests or contributions from the HornetQ community should now be placed into the Artemis stream of development. HornetQ will be mostly in maintenance only mode, aside of fixing bugs of its active branches. The HornetQ could easily migrate to Artemis 1.0.0 as Artemis is already compatible with HornetQ clients; it supports a number of other protocols such as AMQP, Stomp, ActiveMQ's native messaging protocol 'OpenWire' and also JMS 2. In addition the team started development on support for MQTT.
Features
It has the following relevant features:
Supports STOMP and now AMQP 1.0 protocols for cross-language clients