So, what might you recommend instead? I'm using rabbitmq on a couple of projects, and have been a bit underwhelmed by the lack of management tools that come with it. I figured something as basic as getting a list of what's in a queue and being able to then remove that item from a queue would not require me to write custom code, but I seem to have been wrong.
The RabbitMQ management plugin does provide an excellent command line interface. You download it along with its docs right from the management UI (/cli).
Btw, I'm using RabbitMQ, and I love it. My needs do not include high load or high availability though so I can't speak for that. So what's nice about it? AMQP (you automatically get lots of tools, docs, "expectations", etc), very friendly and active mailing lists, small & clean code base, small footprint, simple, active (more features are always being added).
What I don't like about RabbitMQ? While it's FLOSS inside out, its development isn't exactly a "community" work. For example, I can't report an issue, attach a patch, and receive a reviewer/committer feedback about it and possibly get it in. In fact, I can't even report an issue into their issue tracking system -- I just have the mailing list. That said, I believe they said they are going to fix that part "soon".
But it's true that the community has been much more involved in clients like Pika, for example.
And yes we are planning to open up the bug tracker.
A piece of advice for anyone doing an open source project - start with an open tracker, because opening up a previously closed tracker is a royal pain in the butt.
