I'm looking for a client (as in GUI client, not client library) to play with our MQ server and familiarize myself with its semantics. Something that will send and receive messages at the press of a button (or a text command) and maybe even update me about the status of the server queues and messages. Administration would be a bonus. The UI doesn't have to be graphical (i.e. command line clients are fine).
The server will probably run RabbitMQ so anything RabbitMQ-specific is fine, as is ActiveMQ. But I'd rather have a generic AMQP or STOMP tool.
So, does anything of the sort exist?
I know some management and monitoring tools come with both server distributions, but no clients, right?
Check out the BQL RabbitMQ plugin.
It gives you an SQL-style language for AMQP. For instance,
BQL> create exchange myexchange;
ok
BQL> create durable queue 'myqueue'
ok
BQL> select name,messages from queues where 'durable'=true order by name
----------------------
| name | messages |
----------------------
| myqueue | 0 |
Obviously, it's RabbitMQ specific.
If you're willing to do a bit of coding, you could take a look at the examples in the RabbitMQ Java and .NET clients:
They're not quite graphical, but trying to understand them forces you to ask the right questions.
It's been a while, but I remember thinking that the best way to familiarize yourself with AMQP is to read the 0-9-1 spec and write some simple programs; in particular, the protocol documentation on that site gives a lot of examples.