One of my colleagues, Steve, spoke to me the other day about using SMTP for application integration.

Its something that I’ve thought about from time to time, and it just seems to make sense. Here is a protocol that has been around for years, is battle-tested, and is used by millions of systems all over the world to reliably transfer messages. In case you haven’t guessed yet, SMTP is the protocol used for email. Why spend a fortune on enterprise message brokers, when you could download exim or postfix (or sendmail if you’re a masochist). Most linux, BSD or unix boxes will probably have one of these installed already.

SMTP is point to point, so what if we want pub-sub? Handily, there is a protocol called NNTP which has been around about as long as SMTP. This is the protocol that USENET (aka newsgroups) uses.

I definitely think that there is much our industry could learn from technologies invented 20 or more years ago.