A Ruby-based lightweight publish-subscribe messaging system | Hacker News Reader

A Ruby-based lightweight publish-subscribe messaging system

github.com

28 pointsstevewilhelm8 comments

For those who don't know, nats is at the core of cloudfoundry. It's a great tool if you're in an all ruby world. The author wrote messaging software for Tibco before vmware so he knows his stuff.

Having said that, 0mq is probably a better choice these days since it's cross language. Still you can build some fun stuff with nats.

Can anyone suggest an exisiting tool to achieve the following--what I want isn't quite a message queue, but has similarities.

-Queue paths that clients can subscribe to for pub/sub.

-Queues that, upon reconnect, replay their history to date.

-Api for listing listeners and their IP's

-Fast

-Scalable

-Heartbeating or presence

-Status-queues (a queue that sends the same message on first connect, and only re-broadcasts when the status changes)

-API that lets you view messages non-destructively

-API that lets you list clients

-Queues that broadcast a message to all

-Round-robin queues

Do I need to roll my own, or have I missed some existing tool?

I don't know if something like this exists, but if you do roll your own I would recommend using Redis as the backend - either have your clients connect to Redis directly and have a "tender" process keeping track of the keys, or just use Redis "behind" the queue server.

I haven't seen any one product that does all of that, but generally I want to separate heartbeating and status updates from the other queue functionality. ZooKeeper will do a lot of the heartbeating, presence, status changes, list clients, etc. I don't think it's designed to function as a queue though. I think with a combination of Redis and ZooKeeper you could get what you want.

How is it different from faye? Faye is also eventmachine ruby code. Faye is 'simple' and NATS is 'lightweight' ?

Interesting, but why force people to type NATS in caps all the time?

There you go:

    nats = NATS

What is the advantage of this over zeromq? zeromq supports intra-process pub/sub messaging.

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