HornetQ is an open source project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, very high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system.
After 2 years of effort, Fox realised the original JBoss Messaging codebase had been almost completely rewritten and it was decided to release it under a different name.
[2] In September 2010 Fox released the results of a set of benchmarks comparing HornetQ performance with other popular messaging systems.
The hope is that the union of the two great communities HornetQ and ActiveMQ will provide a path for a next generation of message broker with more advanced features, better performance and greater stability.
The community hopes to achieve these goals using the Artemis core with its superior performance in combination with the vast feature offering of ActiveMQ.