David Pollak wrote a piece titled ActiveMQ: not ready for primetime. I’ve used ActiveMQ a few times and I agree, it is indeed a pain to configure and use. The failover with Master/Slave and Network of brokers is complex to setup. In general it feels like Struts and EJB of messaging systems. Hopefully we’ll have some simpler messaging alternatives gain traction.
He talks about kestrel whichis in scala and seems interesting.