[zeromq-dev] Designing a new architecture

[Michel Pelletier]

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 9:50 AM, andrea crotti <andrea.crotti.0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have to restructure a complex application and I would like to do this
> with zeromq, I'm reading the doc and trying out things but I'm a bit
> lost now, so some hints might be very useful..
>
> The application I'm writing is very parallel, there are many
> long-running processes that do things, managed by a central daemon.
>
> I would like to be able to communicate with these processes to check the
> current status, and interact with it, and these processes should write
> the results on a common sink.
>
> So it looks like the multiple worker with a sink might be the right
> choice, but I also want to be able to communicate with every single
> process separately.

I would suggest looking at the ROUTER socket in detail and
specifically the LRU pattern in the guide.  You may only need the
"back-half" of the LRU pattern to do what you need.  This allows you
to have bidirectional communication with a bunch of workers.

> Another thing which I'd like to do is to use Python Cmd class, and I
> thought I could create a zmq class that behaves like a file, and thus be
> passed in the Cmd object.

I would avoid stretching the file abstraction over a zmq socket like
that.   Maybe another library that is more flexible for command line
and simple interpreters like cliff
(http://pypi.python.org/pypi/cliff/) would be easier for you to
integrate with zmq.  Cmd after all, is pretty archaic and file
oriented.

-Michel