• Adherence to the JMS specification.
• Performance and throughput. (I am using SonicMQ’s benchmarking guide as a basis.)
• Scalability
• Clustering and reliability
• Cost

And a few things that may/may-not be typical thrown in for good measure:

• Support for Dead Letter Queues (DLQ)
• Ease of manageability (UI Management Console, for example)
• Distributed transaction support
• Etc

So what’s so hard about this seemingly straightforward task? Well to start with most vendors don’t seem to publish much in the way of comparisons against their competitors. They provide plenty of information as to why you should choose them, but little in the way data that distinguishes them from their competition. All such comparisons that I have been able to obtain to date have concerned themselves with performance criteria only. Don’t get me wrong, performance is important, but so are any number of things.

The documentation provided by most vendors is equally lacking, or difficult to find, or simply non-existent.

As such, I am (frustratingly) left with having to download, install, learn and play with most of the vendor products. Sigh. Stay tuned to this one. I will update this entry with my findings.

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