[zeromq-dev] error in the guide?

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 4:24 PM, Chuck Remes <cremes.devlist at mac.com> wrote:

> On IRC today, someone was trying to get explicit routing between ROUTER and DEALER sockets working. They were referring to this section of the guide:
>
> http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#toc49
>
> There is no mention made of separating the routing frames/envelope from the application frames with a null message delimiter. The example code given also doesn't do this.
>
> Isn't that wrong? Shouldn't there *always* be a null message part between the routing envelope and the application frames?

Inserting the null message part systematically is kind of cargo-cult
programming. It does something specific which is irrelevant to ROUTER
operation. It only makes sense if your target is a REP socket, which
is rarely the case for custom routing. So people end up doing this by
rote, just because others do it and it doesn't seem to do harm. I'm
not enthusiastic about teaching people to act by rote.

-Pieter