Stomp is a great protocol for a few simple reasons. 1. It is Human Readable and incredibly simple to implement (a reasonable parser might be 20-100 lines depending on your language) 2. Stomp clients already exist in 14 different languages, including Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, and JavaScript. 3. There are an increasing number of servers/brokers that support Stomp; it is the most widely inter-operable MQ protocol at this point, with support in at least five servers. 4. Stomp clients can easily consume JMS via ActiveMQ or StompConnect, and easily consume AMQP via RabbitMQ. 5. Writing a light-weight Stomp server is not prohibitively difficult. (such as MorbidQ). This type of server is great for embedding so as to ease development and can generally make life easy for small/medium deployments.