A rational for why you would want to do this is here.

I couldn’t find an AMQP library written in browser side JavaScript but I did find a STOMP JavaScript library which works nicely with a server-side STOMP plugin so we use STOMP as our message protocol.

STOMP is a simpler more text-oriented messaging protocol which includes HTTP-like headers. RabbitMQ has a plugin for implementing STOMP and that plugin allows access to AMQP based exchanges and queues by mapping STOMP destinations to exchange/queue names.

You will need:

  • Native WebSockets or SockJS on the browser side
  • The STOMP.js browser library
  • A SockJS server which is conveniently available in the rabbitmq_web_stomp plugin for rabbitmq (bundled with rabbitmq)
  • A STOMP compliant message broker which is available via the rabbitmq_stomp plugin for rabbitmq (bundled with rabbitmq)

Install rabbitmq and enable the plugins:

sudo apt-get install rabbitmq
sudo rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management
sudo rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_web_stomp
sudo service rabbitmq-server restart

Configure exchanges/queues:

  1. Log into http://localhost:15672/ with user guest and password guest.
  2. Create a new test exchange (called test in my code) and a new test queue (called test in my code).
  3. Create bindings between the new exchange and queue.
  4. Manually publish a message in the exchange and ensure it arrives in the queue.

Copy the following two files:

<!-- index.html -->

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <title>Rabbits in the front-end</title>

        <a href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.4/jquery.js">https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.4/jquery.js</a>
        <a href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/stomp.js/2.3.3/stomp.js">https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/stomp.js/2.3.3/stomp.js</a>
        <a href="http://script.js">http://script.js</a>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form>
            <input type="text" value="">
            <button id="send">Send</button>
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

/** script.js */

var RabbitMQ = {
    hostname: window.location.hostname,
    port: 15674,
    path: "stomp/websocket",

    username: "guest",
    password: "guest",

    exchange: "/exchange/test",
    queue: "/queue/test",

    onMessage: function(message) {
        alert(message.body);
    },
    onSuccess: function(message) { 
        this.subscribe(RabbitMQ.queue, RabbitMQ.onMessage);
    },
    onError: function() {
        console.log(arguments);
    }
};


var ws = new WebSocket("ws://" + RabbitMQ.hostname + ":"+RabbitMQ.port+"/"+RabbitMQ.path);

var qc = Stomp.over(ws);
qc.heartbeat.outgoing = 0;
qc.heartbeat.incoming = 0;
qc.connect(
    RabbitMQ.username,
    RabbitMQ.password,
    RabbitMQ.onSuccess,
    RabbitMQ.onError,
    "/"
);



$(window).load(function() {
    $("form button#send").click(function(e) {
        e.preventDefault();

        var parent = $(this).parent();

        if ($("input", parent).val()) {
            qc.send(RabbitMQ.exchange, null, $("input", parent).val());

            $("input", parent).val("")
        }

        return false;
    });
});

And finally visit http://localhost/index.html to check the results.