What gets me most excited about RabbitMQ is that people keep finding new and better ways to use it. Messaging has truly come of age and stands beside databases and web applications as a technology that every professional developer needs to know.
In 2006, when RabbitMQ was born, messaging was mostly used by companies that had way too many IT systems and desperately needed some way to connect them. Jargon words such as "pubsub" and "queue" were strictly for messaging geeks and highly paid integration consultants. But the world was already changing and we were about to find out why.
Today's software and web applications are increasing in scale rapidly. There are more users, apps, devices, places, and ways to connect; this creates a burning need to build more scalable applications. At the same time, these new applications have to integrate with existing systems and services written using any language or API you care to think of. There is only one way to deliver scalability in this kind of environment: use messaging. The best way to do that is via a product such as RabbitMQ.
We started RabbitMQ because there was no messaging tool that was really powerful and dependable, yet easy to get started with. We decided to make one. We hope you like it.
The fun part is designing the tool so that you, the developer, feel like RabbitMQ is actually helping you to build better apps, instead of getting in the way. Your use of the tool should grow with your system.
The hard part is balancing simplicity and power. With RabbitMQ, we think we got this about right. Developers have little tolerance for complexity and nonsense. But beware! There is such a thing as "fake simplicity"; if a tool makes promises that seem too good to be true, then something is almost certainly broken. A truly simple system makes its capabilities obvious when they are needed. RabbitMQ will never lie to you or conceal its true behavior and we think this is essential in a good tool.
In this book, David Dossot has shown how messaging can help anyone architect and design solid scalable apps and how RabbitMQ can deliver on this promise. In 2014, everyone can grok the basics of messaging. Read this book to get started.
Alexis Richardson
Former CEO, Rabbit Technologies Inc.