Python and messaging

gistfile1.txt

Messaging is a well established domain in information technology and can
greatly improve the scalability and throughput of a system when employed
appropriately. Message queues can be used to achieve

    - spatial decoupling i.e. the systems that produce and consume
      messages may be deployed on different machines, networks,
      continents etc.
    - temporal decoupling i.e. a system can enqueue a message and
      carry on without waiting for the message consumer.

We use e.g. messaging in OpenQuake (http://openquake.org) to distribute
calculations of seismic hazard and the respective risk to human lives
and infrastructure.

There is a huge number of messaging patterns identified in the industry
[7] and a small selection of these will be presented to whet your
appetite :-)

AMQP [1] is a fairly new and open messaging standard with a number of
freely available open source message brokers (RabbitMQ [2], ZeroMQ [3],
qpid [4] etc.) with different features and performance trade-offs.
 
In the course of the talk you will be introduced to
    - AMQP concepts and jargon
    - available Python AMQP bindings (focussing on an asynchronous
      (txAMQP [5]) and a synchronous variant (most likely kombu [6]))

Furthermore there will be many code examples demonstrating how to use
the Python bindings.

The presentation (45 minutes in total) is structured as follows:

    7.5 minutes for messaging concepts and patterns
    7.5 minutes for AMQP concepts
    5 minutes for an overview of the Python bindings for AMQP
    10 minutes for txAMQP examples (asynchronous bindings)
    10 minutes for kombu examples (synchronous bindings)
    5 minutes for questions

References:

[1] http://www.amqp.org/
[2] http://www.rabbitmq.com/
[3] http://www.zeromq.org/
[4] http://qpid.apache.org/
[5] https://launchpad.net/txamqp
[6] http://ask.github.com/kombu/
[7] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321200683/