Sunday, August 19, 2012

0MQ Introduction

What is 0MQ?

0MQ is a very simple library that is used for managing the communication between different processes. It is a way of using enterprise messaging patterns without the need for an enterprise messaging server. By removing the server and using the socket API, a level of complexity is removed which leads to a simpler model good for concurrent programming.


0MQ has its roots firmly in the world of financial services. Originally, there were two vendors, TIBCO and IBM, which each had their own protocols for enterprise messaging. This made it hard for banks to intercommunicate. In 2003 the London office of JP Morgan created the first draft of Advanced Message Queue Protocol (AMQP) which was an attempt to create a standard communication protocol for messaging systems.

In 2005 iMatix were contracted by JP Morgan to create a message broker based on the new specification and they produced OpenAMQ. The new standard was received well by others in the financial services and new members were added to the working group. However, the complexity of AMQP grew and led to iMatix leaving the working group. In 2008 Pieter Hintjens of iMatix wrote What is wrong with AMQP and how to fix it. Here Hitchens applauds early versions of the specification for being concise and simple to implement but then criticised later versions for the complexity. He argues that any specification that is too complex will fail. It is also clear that the experience iMatix had developing OpenAMQ gave them good insight into a new way of supporting high speed messaging. This experience led them to conclude that the way to simplify messaging was to remove the server that hosted the queues for the clients. This led to the development of 0MQ.

Not a message bus

In traditional enterprise messaging there is a server which hosts the queues and roots the messages. If you are using IBM this maybe WebSphere, a Microsoft shop would use MSMQ, whilst others may use RabbitMQ. All of theses solutions involve some software being installed on a server. Clients then bind to the queues they host to process messages.

0MQ is different in that it does not have a central server component, it is just a software library. For network communications you write the server and client components using the 0MQ API. Internally 0MQ uses TCP sockets to create the connection. For a lot of scenarios this is removing a redundant step in the process. Take the example of a time server on the network whose job it is to respond to requests for current time. With an enterprise service bus my time server would bind to a queue on the central exchange. Any client that wanted to know the time would send a request to that queue and wait for a response. In this operation the central server is not adding much to the task. Using 0MQ this same server can be created very easily

The client that requests data from this service is

Applications that 0MQ is good for

By combining messaging patterns with socket based communication 0MQ is very good for concurrent programming. Concurrent programming can be across a network, within a machine or within a process. 0MQ uses the same patterns for all of these.

In the example above we created a server by binding to a tcp port timeServer.Bind("tcp://*:5555"); for a service hosted on a network. To host this in process or one a machine we just change the binding type:
  • A way to connect processes on any machine and pass messages between them:
  • A way to connect processes within a machine and pass messages between them:
  • A way to create threads in a process and pass messages between them:


0MQ is a very easy library to start using as it involves including a couple of DLL’s in your project and does not need any other infrastructure to support it. It has good abstractions and it is easy to create a variety of messaging queues.

Where I think 0MQ is really powerful is when it is applied to multi threaded programming. This is because 0MQ uses the same model for threaded programming as that used for concurrent programming across networks. Both of these pass messages to communicate instead of sharing state and this avoidance of shared state between threads leads to more reliable and simpler programs. I shall explain this fully in my next blog post.


MrAntix said...

Thanks Keith,

That's certainly got me interested.
Have you used NullMQ or any thing in the browser to communicate with 0MQ in .net?

Keith Bloom said...

Hi Ant,

No, I haven't seen NullMQ before but I will be checking it out later.

One thing that I thought would be interesting is to introduce ZeroMQ to SignalR. I have heard good things about SignalR and I feel it would be a good web front end for ZeroMQ in the .Net world.

DLed said...

Hi, you have a charming typo in the article: Hitchens->Hintjens

Keith Bloom said...

@DLed thanks for spotting and mentioning the typo. Pieter's name is now correct.