Emulating Amazon SQS during development

Solution 1:

For SQS I wrote ElasticMQ, which you can run either embedded (it's written in Scala, so runs on the JVM) or stand-alone. It has both persistent and in-memory modes, the first being good for dev, second for testing.

Solution 2:

Some of the Amazon SDKs have "mock" mode, which is:

The mock service is an alternate way to use the sample code. The service doesn't call AWS, but instead returns a set response that you can modify to suit your needs (the XML response files are in the Mock directory). The mock service makes it easy for you to test how your application handles different responses.

For SQS, it appears the Perl and PHP SDKs have mock mode. I know that the .NET SDK for Amazon RDS also has the mock mode.

The Java SDK doesn't contain mock implementations:

The client mock implementations have been removed. Instead, developers are encouraged to use more flexible and full featured mock libraries, such as EasyMock, jMock

If the SDK you will be using doesn't have the mock mode available, you could probably create your own similar type of thing which returns the preconfigured responses instead of actually hitting up the service.

See here for more info