AMQP stands for the Advanced Message Queue Protocol and is a specification for how messaging clients and brokers can interoperate. AMQP is a specification of a wire-level protocol for client to message broker communication. It is not a messaging system like ActiveMQ, but just a messaging protocol.
ActiveMQ is aiming to provide support for AMQP 1.0 once it is finalised, as well as other open protocols.
ActiveMQ already supports other open wire protocols:
Through these protocols, ActiveMQ can support clients in C, C++, C#, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Pike etc. AMQP is most similar to OpenWire, because both OpenWire and AMQP are designed for high performance messaging, through a binary (rather than text-based) format. As a text-based format, STOMP is much easier to implement, but gives somewhat slower performance.
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