[zeromq-dev] What are some use cases for zeromq?

[Chuck Remes]

On Jan 7, 2012, at 12:06 PM, Brandon Rampersad wrote:

> Hello Guys,
> 
> I was reading the zeromq docs and i get the general idea for zeromq but i can't seem to find out what are some of the best use cases for zeromq for example. Is zeromq best suitable for lan networking such as connecting computers together behind a firewall or is it also acceptable to use it over the internet to write for instance a chat or video chat application? Or are all these use cases acceptable?

Brandon,

if you read the docs (and by "docs" I hope you meant the guide) then there are several use-cases presented and solved there for your perusal. For example, look at Chapter 4 and the advanced patterns it walks through. The lazy pirate and majordomo patterns are very useful for solving many classes of problems. The ventilator-sink pattern (in a different chapter I think) is also quite useful for assembly-line or pipeline-style work.

Regarding private LAN versus public LAN, I know we have users that have built products on top of 0mq for both purposes. Personally all of my 0mq code runs on a private LAN but there is *nothing* preventing me from running that same code on the public internet.

Also, please take a look at the FAQ. There is an entry under the Security heading that addresses use of 0mq on the public internet. In old releases (older than a year ago) there were problems where a "fuzzing attack" (sending arbitrary data to a 0mq socket) would cause an assert in the library (i.e. abort & crash). As of the 2.1 release, all known issues were repaired. We are now on release 2.1.11 with 3.1.0-beta peeking its nose out too. If you run into any issues where bad data causes a crash, it's a bug and we would appreciate a bug report.

Good luck and welcome to the community.

cr