Is the AMQP protocol suitable for building web based instant messaging applications?

Question

At the moment our infrastructure doesn't support XMPP but this is what the big boys (Facebook, Google) seem to use as their protocol of choice. Is there anything that makes XMPP particularly suited to this application compared AMQP? In the end I believe in using the right tool for the job. If AMQP has any glaring weaknesses in this regard it is something I'm interested in finding about.

Answer 1

For one, AMQP does can not work over HTTP, or web sockets. So AMQP could be used inside your network, but not directly in your client browsers.

Answer 2

Instant messaging is the basic usage for XMPP and it is designed with this purpose in mind. It can certainly be used beyond that scope, but it is very good at this function.

Microsoft Messenger and Skype also offer XMPP for messaging.

AMQP is a more general purpose messaging protocol, and lacks things like presence which are fairly core to any IM protocol.