Why use AMQP/ZeroMQ/RabbitMQ

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as opposed to writing your own library.

We're working on a project here that will be a self-dividing server pool, if one section grows too heavy, the manager would divide it and put it on another machine as a separate process. It would also alert all connected clients this affects to connect to the new server.

I am curious about using ZeroMQ for inter-server and inter-process communication. My partner would prefer to roll his own. I'm looking to the community to answer this question.

I'm a fairly novice programmer myself and just learned about messaging queues. As i've googled and read, it seems everyone is using messaging queues for all sorts of things, but why? What makes them better than writing your own library? Why are they so common and why are there so many?

zeromq amqp rabbitmq messaging
6 Answers

That's very much like asking: why use a database when you can write your own?

The answer is that using a tool that has been around for a while and is well understood in lots of different use cases, pays off more and more over time and as your requirements evolve. This is especially true if more than one developer is involved in a project. Do you want to become support staff for a queueing system if you change to a new project? Using a tool prevents that from happening. It becomes someone else's problem.

Case in point: persistence. Writing a tool to store one message on disk is easy. Writing a persistor that scales and performs well and stably, in many different use cases, and is manageable, and cheap to support, is hard. If you want to see someone complaining about how hard it is then look at this: http://www.lshift.net/blog/2009/12/07/rabbitmq-at-the-skills-matter-functional-programming-exchange

Anyway, I hope this helps. By all means write your own tool. Many many people have done so. Whatever solves your problem, is good.

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