This blogpost will briefly describe what message queues are, how and where this technology will be used and as I promised in my previous blogpost, and here it is. 🙌

Let’s tackle this topic with:

What are message queues in the first place? 📤 ✉️ 📥

Message queues are used to decouple applications by adding a common communication layer, that makes applications communicate over this layer rather than peer to peer. The message could possibly be anything that can be saved as simple text. An application or a software sends a message to the message queue where it's being stored until an application or software takes the message off again. There are several technologies that gets the job done but one of the most famous ones, nowadays, is RabbitMQ.
This is a very brief explanation, so bear with me if it’s simplified too much because I don't want to deepdive in the basics too much.

To put the advantages of message queuing in a nutshell:

• Fault tolerance 😶 because, if one system breaks for whatever reason another system can still send messages to the queue
• Improve scalability 😮 because, if there is a unexpected load on an application you can create multiple instances of this application to balance the load and it will easily use message queues for communication
• Decrease latency 😲 because, since messages are being sent asynchronously, systems don't have to wait for each other before finishing a cross-system task

How am I going to use message queues?

There is a framework called Sylius, which I will not be explaining. If you are interested in it, but don't want to spend hours reading their doc, have a look at one of Lukas' software evualuation post about Sylius. Basically, this framework is an eCommerce framework which is based on Symfony. People that know Symfony, know symfonies bundle-system.
For the others: You can extend Symfony applications easily by adding bundles. Bundles can be seen like plugins to a Symfony application. There is an open-source bundle called “SyliusImportExportPlugin”. As the name implies, you can import and export data of the eCommerce application with this bundle. The main topic of my bachelor’s thesis is, to add a mq system into this import/export plugin and see how the mq system affects the latency, scalability and fault tolerance by doing benchmarks.
The following (beautiful) drawing illustrates the changes I'll be doing to the bundle:

The regular file export and the red part will be benchmarked and implifications will be discussed in my scientific paper.
I will make a follow up post about the benchmarks, findings, as well as the comparison before and after my project.

Why did I choose this subject?

I liked the subject because it gives me the opportunity, to learn something about a solution, to the problem of having no fault tolerance, not being able scale and systems having the need of wait for each other. Two different systems talking to each other is not an easy task. Before having message queues: An admin had to export data from the system to a file and then (bestcase) import the file without changing anything to another system. By queuing messages, this task can be automated.

"Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people."

• Steve Jobs

Thanks to everyone that is helping me with working on the bundle and in addition for helping me on my way to graduation.
Thanks to Michael Weibel and Fabian Ryf for helping me with this blogpost.
You guys are all 🔥

My talk mostly demoed how easy is to leverage messaging in your applications. The goal of my talk was to show that you don't need to be a big player to require messaging. If you need to do some background processing in your web app then RabbitMQ might be the tool you are looking for.  What I could realized during my talk is that sometimes people fail to see the relation between doing background processing and messaging. To be more precise the relation between Job Queues and Messaging .

I often get the question “can you do job queues with RabbitMQ?”. Answer: Yes you can. The problem is when you brand your messages as “jobs” what you are doing is specializing the concept of messages, but in fact at the end you are just sending messages around. You have a server that keeps them for you and when there's a consumer (worker) ready to get those messages then RabbitMQ will send them to that consumer. It's as simple as that.

The main advantages of using messaging terminology is that you get exposed to a broader spectrum of applications for the technology. So you stop thinking just in terms of “job processing and background tasks” and you start seeing that with messaging you can do much more things like easily bringing interoperability to your app. Do you have a polyglot system and you need to integrate your Python app with your PHP code. Then use messaging and benefit from the dozen of clients that exist for different programming languages which will allow your apps to interact with each other via RabbitMQ.

There are a lot of use cases for Messaging. Many of those are best described in the book Enterprise Integration Patterns which I would greatly recommend to those interested in how messaging can help them to scale their apps and make them more decoupled than what you could achieve by using a framework like Symfony2.

To wrap up: RabbitMQ is an open source messaging server that can easily get you into the messaging dream land. If you use Symfony2 then don't hesitate to try our RabbitMQBundle that will help you to integrate RabbitMQ into your symfony applications.