Joshua Kramer has an article in LJ about Qpid and AMQP. One of the most compelling aspects of Qpid is its cross plaform and cross language capability. Finally there is a message broker that is easy to use and has ready to go clients for C++, Java, Python, Ruby and .Net. Take a look and let me know what you think.
You can also use RabbitMQ for the same purpose. It has a massive universe of language clients, speaking AMQP. And it is distributed in a number of Linux distros. Take a look! http://www.rabbitmq.com/how.html is a good place to start.
Cheers
alexis
RabbitMQ
Thank you for the suggestion Alexis. RabbitMQ looks promising. I will check it out.