Learning ØMQ with pyzmq

ØMQ is a neat messaging library that allows you that allows you to build your own messaging infrastructure. ØMQ does not provide out of box messaging system experience like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ. It is higher level concept than sockets and provides as low level conceptual framework as possible to build messaging systems. It can help build framework that scales where services could be handled by different applications that does one job well.

Distributed applications are also easier to change compared to a monolithic applications. It’s expensive to try to define the behavior of each of many software applications that work together in a large network. It’s much cheaper, and more flexible, to define the interfaces between them: the APIs. Messaging is an API that can be stretched across a network.

pyzmq provides python bindings for ØMQ and allows you to leverage ØMQ in python applications. I have been using pyzmq-static with virtualenv as it neatly provides isolated sandbox for my learning.

This tutorial is my journey into ØMQ programming with python. Hopefully, it will help you too.

Code

Code is present as folders inside each of the chapters. You can obtain them through github pyzmqnotes project.

Acknowledgements

Learning and experimenting with ØMQ through python adaptor pyzmq has been a very exciting experience. Thanks to all those who have contributed to it. Many folks have written articles and blogged on ØMQ. I wouldn’t have stumbled on this great tool without that. I have tried to mention some of the excellent articles that I happened to read on this subject in the reference section.

I always begrudged writing documents till Sphinx came along. It is quite exciting to be able to share my notes through readthedocs. Of course, all these has been made very easy through github.

Contact

Do send your suggestions/corrections for improvement at “ashish.vid” at gmail dot com (Ashish Vidyarthi).