Book Image

ZeroMQ

By : Faruk Akgul
Book Image

ZeroMQ

By: Faruk Akgul

Overview of this book

<p>ØMQ (also spelled ZeroMQ, 0MQ, or ZMQ) is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library aimed at use in scalable distributed or concurrent applications. It provides a message queue, but unlike message-oriented middleware, a ØMQ system can run without a dedicated message broker. The library is designed to have a familiar socket-style API.<br /><br />"ZeroMQ" teaches you to use ZeroMQ through examples in C programming language. You will learn how to use fundamental patterns of message/queuing with a step-by-step tutorial approach and how to apply them. Then, you’ll learn how to use high level APIs and to work with multiple sockets and multithreaded programs through many examples.<br /><br />This book looks at how message/queue works in general and what kinds of problems it solves. Then, it explains how ZeroMQ works and how it differs from other message/queue libraries and how it can be used in different scenarios.<br /><br />You will also learn how to apply essential message/queue design patterns in different scenarios, and how they differ from each other. It shows you practical examples you can apply. You will also learn how to work with multiple sockets.<br /><br />You will learn the basics of ZeroMQ as well as how to use different patterns.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

The beginning


Humans are social and will always socially interact with each other for as long as they exist. Programs are no different. A program has to communicate with another program since we are living in a connected world. We have UDP, TCP, HTTP, IPX, WebSocket, and other relevant protocols to connect applications.

However, such low-level approaches make things harder and we need something easier and faster. High-level abstractions sacrifice speed and flexibility whereas directly dealing with low-level details is not easy to master and use. That is where ZeroMQ shows up as the savior, giving us the usability features of high-level techniques with the speed of low-level approaches.

Before we start digging into ZeroMQ, let's first have a brief introduction on the general concept of message queues.