Website snapshot

content/blog/whyzeromq.md

@@ -0,0 +1,62 @@
+---
+title: "Why ZeroMQ"
+date: 2019-06-16T19:26:50-04:00
+draft: false
+---
+
+I've been playing around with ZeroMQ recently and it's been really exciting. This blog post is going to outline why I think you should be using ZeroMQ today.
+
+First of all, before you compare this to other products like RabbitMQ, DDS, etc. Realize that this is a static library that you link to in your application as opposed to a broker you run. This means that you can get the benefits with this library for very little overhead.
+
+## Easier Sockets
+
+Instead of talking about how easy ZeroMQ is to use, I'm going to just show you the code to implement a server-client relationship in Python.
+
+**Server.py**
+
+```python
+import zmq
+import time
+
+port = "5556"
+context = zmq.Context()
+socket = context.socket(zmq.REP)
+socket.bind("tcp://*:%s" % port)
+
+while True:
+    msg = socket.recv()
+    print(msg)
+    time.sleep(1)
+    socket.send_string("Server Message To Client")
+```
+
+**Client.py**
+
+```python
+import zmq
+import time
+
+port = "5556"
+context = zmq.Context()
+socket = context.socket(zmq.REQ)
+socket.connect("tcp://localhost:%s" % port)
+
+while True:
+    socket.send_string("client message to server")
+    time.sleep(1)
+    msg = socket.recv()
+    print(msg)
+
+```
+
+And just like that we have a way to transport messages back and forth. No need to make a special header before each message to know the appropriate size of the packets. ZeroMQ abstracts those details from you.
+
+## Different Transports Available
+
+You're not limited to only `TCP`. You can use `inproc` for thread-to-thread messaging, `ipc` for inter-process communication, and `epgm` or `pgm` for multicast messaging. Most of the time, just changing the connection string in `socket.connect` just works!
+
+## Common Networking Patterns Built In
+
+Sometimes we just want a dumb pipe between two ends (`pipe`) but most of the times we're writing applications that follow the `server-client` or `publisher-subscriber` architecture. That gets defined in `context.socket`.
+
+Ex: `context.socket(zmq.PAIR)`