[zeromq-dev] Set up a broker as NameServer service

[Daniel Sentenac]

Hello,

First of all thanks for your web site and articles like "broker vs 
brokerless" that is very helpful to understand
messaging service architectures.
I am working for a big experiment involving a lot of control command 
among about 500 processes dispatch on more than 100 cpu machines.
We currently use a simple messaging service called Cm that is working as 
a "broker as NameServer service".
It was developped 15 years ago and actually does very well its job.  It 
makes simple and system independent the task-to-task communication 
problem, by hiding every detail of the use of TCP-IP on which it is 
based. It is peer-to-peer type of communication with a NameServer broker 
daemon that only holds all the connection points associated with a name 
for each process, and allow to monitor the list of processes running, 
and show inter connections, kill them etc.... All processes can 
communicate with any other declared in the same Cm Domain (an 
environment variable), by simply declaring itself with a name to the 
daemon using the CmMessageOpenServer function. To receive messages,  
handler functions are be commonly defined with associated type that 
determine the type of messages to be treated. Very importantly, a 
timeout function CmMessageWaitWithTimeout. can be set not to block the 
running processes waiting for a message  Messages can be sent using the 
appropriated type, and a arbitrary serie of strings, double, int, arrays 
data, and the sender can wait to receive the corresponding answer using 
the appropriated handler type response. Message handling is 
asynchronous. Cm is light socket based, but monothreaded, and works only 
on Linux, the Windows platform  not being up-to-date. We have also a 
very handy command line executable that allows to send and receive 
answer to any process in the appropriated Cm Domain. So I wonder, 
looking for a new maybe more powerful messaging service, if zeromq could 
be the right one.
What I like is that zeromq is light, multithreaded, multi-platform, and 
seems to be very robust after the tests shown. I think it is a good base 
to develop the type of architecture "broker as a NameServer service"
But we would need to :
1) Write the daemon "broker as a NameServer service" by hiding all the 
IP details
2) Provide the handler function layer, with a simple message writing 
protocol (serie of strings, int, double, arrays)
3) Provide a command line executable to send/receive messages

I think it would be a very attractive product, for control-command 
oriented environments.
Looking in the web, I could not find easily any simple product like Cm.

Have anyone already thought about this type of application in the zeromq 
community ?

Daniel