[jgalentine007]

Interestingly enough I picked RabbitMQ for the same reasons for a distributed execution system I designed at work. RabbitMQ provides a lot of nice to have features and flexibility when it comes to delivering messages between endpoints. The fact that you get access control, easy encryption, multiple protocols (mqtt/amqp/stomp etc), excellent reliability and scalability rolled into a mature system is pretty awesome. The concepts are easy to understand and get real code working. The interfaces with RabbitMQ are simple enough that you could replace it with something else without having to untangle a whole lot. The other killer feature for me was async event listening which cuts out a lot of overhead from polling / long polling.