STOMP stands for Simple (or Streaming) Text Message-Oriented Middleware Protocol. It is a text-based protocol designed by Codehaus to operate with message-oriented middleware. A broker developed in one programming language can receive messages from a client written in another. The protocol has similarities to HTTP and operates over TCP. STOMP consists of a frame header and a frame body. The current specification is STOMP 1.2, dated October 22, 2012, and is available under a free license.

It is different from many protocols presented as it does not deal with subscription topics or queues. It simply uses HTTP-like semantics such as SEND with a destination string. A broker must dissect the message and map to a topic or queue for the client. A consumer of the data will SUBSCRIBE to the destinations provided by the broker.

STOMP has clients written in python (Stomp.py), TCL (tStomp), and Erlang (stomp.erl). Several servers have native STOMP support, such as RabbitMQ (via a plugin), and some servers have been designed in specifics languages (Ruby, Perl, or OCaml).