To Nha Notes | July 26, 2021, 3:34 p.m.
The first thing we need to know about ZeroMQ is that it is not a traditional message queuing system, such as ActiveMQ, WebSphereMQ, or RabbitMQ. ZeroMQ is different. It gives us the tools to build our own message queuing system. It is a library.
ZeroMQ is simple. We can do some asynchronous I/O operations and ZeroMQ could queue the message in an I/O thread. ZeroMQ I/O threads are asynchronous when handling network traffic, so it can do the rest of the job for us. If you have worked on sockets before, you will know that it is quite painful to work on. However, ZeroMQ makes it easy to work on sockets.
ZeroMQ is fast. The website Second Life managed to get 13.4 microseconds end-to-end latencies and up to 4,100,000 messages per second. ZeroMQ can use multicast transport protocol, which is an efficient method to transmit data to multiple destinations.
Unlike other traditional message queuing systems, ZeroMQ is brokerless. In traditional message queuing systems, there is a central message server (broker) in the middle of the network and every node is connected to this central node, and each node communicates with other nodes via the central broker. They do not directly communicate with each other.
However, ZeroMQ is brokerless. In a brokerless design, applications can directly communicate with each other without any broker in the middle.
So let’s start with some code, the “Hello world” example (of course).
#
# Hello World server in Python
# Binds REP socket to tcp://*:5555
# Expects b"Hello" from client, replies with b"World"
#
import time
import zmq
context = zmq.Context()
socket = context.socket(zmq.REP)
socket.bind("tcp://*:5555")
while True:
# Wait for next request from client
message = socket.recv()
print(f"Received request: {message}")
# Do some 'work'
time.sleep(1)
# Send reply back to client
socket.send(b"World")
The server creates a socket of type response (you will read more about request-response later), binds it to port 5555 and then waits for messages. You can also see that we have zero configuration, we are just sending strings.
#
# Hello World client in Python
# Connects REQ socket to tcp://localhost:5555
# Sends "Hello" to server, expects "World" back
#
import zmq
context = zmq.Context()
# Socket to talk to server
print("Connecting to hello world server…")
socket = context.socket(zmq.REQ)
socket.connect("tcp://localhost:5555")
# Do 10 requests, waiting each time for a response
for request in range(10):
print(f"Sending request {request} …")
socket.send(b"Hello")
# Get the reply.
message = socket.recv()
print(f"Received reply {request} [ {message} ]")
The client creates a socket of type request, connects and starts sending messages.
Both the send and receive methods are blocking (by default). For the receive it is simple: if there are no messages the method will block. For sending it is more complicated and depends on the socket type. For request sockets, if the high watermark is reached or no peer is connected the method will block.
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