Welcome to ZeroMQ! This chapter is an introduction to ZeroMQ and gives the reader a general idea of what a message queuing system is and most importantly what ZeroMQ is. In this chapter we will learn about the following topics:
- An overview of what a message queue is
- Why use ZeroMQ and what makes it different from other message queuing technologies
- Basic client/server architecture
- Introducing the first pattern, request-reply
- How we can handle strings in C
- Detecting the installed ZeroMQ version
Humans are social and will always socially interact with each other for as long as they exist. Programs are no different. A program has to communicate with another program since we are living in a connected world. We have UDP, TCP, HTTP, IPX, WebSocket, and other relevant protocols to connect applications.
However, such low-level approaches make things harder and we need something easier and faster. High-level abstractions sacrifice speed and flexibility whereas directly dealing with low-level details is not easy to master and use. That is where ZeroMQ shows up as the savior, giving us the usability features of high-level techniques with the speed of low-level approaches.
Before we start digging into ZeroMQ, let's first have a brief introduction on the general concept of message queues.