We have been prototyping support for a new protocol, as is our wont. This one is called “AMQP 1.0 R0”, and it is the new issue from the AMQP working group (of which RabbitMQ, and latterly VMware, are a member). The “R0” indicates that it’s the first revision of a recommendation. The specification is incomplete: there are many TODOs, and to a large extent it is unproven. Those two facts are part of what prompted this prototyping.

For those who have been away from the internets, node.js is an evented JavaScript engine based on Google’s V8. Because it is essentially one big, efficient event loop, it’s a natural fit for programs that shuffle data backwards and forwards with little state in-between. And it’s fun to program, an opinion apparently lots of people share, because there have been loads of libraries crop up around it. Among the more impressive of these libraries is Socket.