Following Thomas' advice yesterday I experimented with RabbitMQ to fulfil my desire for a suite of applications to broadcast events to each other.
- There is an (unobtrusive) install of 296MB of the Erlang runtime on the server. - The MQ server out-of-the-box has security locked down to localhost only. - The quite pleasant web based management tool which adjusts security is disabled by default and you have reads the online docs carefully to find the command line tool to activate the web tool. - You must learn to look for vital client side error clues deep in nested Exceptions. - You must also learn to look for error details in obscure server side logs. - RabbitMQ seems to be fully featured and industrial strength as advertised. - The .NET client library API is huge and you can be confused by too much choice and many overloads. - The documentation is just acceptable. It took me a couple of hours to find out how to roundtrip "out of band" information with messages. - The higher-level client API does not expose any asynch methods of any kind, just a blocking method to receive incoming messages. This results in ugly clumsy code. I had to create one long-lived Thread to send and another to receive, and I still haven't figured out gracefully close the receiver. So overall, like all large libraries, it's a bit quirky and it's LARGE. For me, I felt like I had installed a vast intercontinental railway system just to deliver some postcards. I'm going to write this off as overkill for now, but at least I know it's available. I didn't get time to play with competitor ZeroMQ. *Greg K*
