MessagingSystems (MQTT and ZeroMQ):
When dealing with messaging systems there are a lot of options available from classical message brokers to simple libraries that handle the messaging logic without a central server. Almost all of them have some variances and each of them has a reason to exist. In this article we will be going to compare a few popular ones and very different ones, namely the message the socket and concurrency library ZeroMQ and the lightweight MQTT broker Mosquitto. Each of them has their own advantages and differences from the others and the client should choose one according to their needs.
MESSAGING PATTERNS
When talking about messaging systems we first have to understand the typical messaging patterns available. In some cases, the user wants to send messages from one program (producer) to another program (consumer) and in other cases the user might have multiple producers or multiple consumers or even multiple steps. Some of these patterns are so common that they have their own names.
PUBLISH-SUBSCRIBE
Publish-Subscribe is a messaging pattern where the user wants to send messages from a set of producers to different consumers. However, messages are not sent to the subscribers directly, but instead each message is published to a so-called topic and subscribers can subscribe to topics and recover only those messages.
COMPETING CONSUMERS
The Competing Consumer pattern is nothing but the user wants to use parallelized consumers to speed up the processing of their messages. In this state the user has one or multiple producers and a set of consumers, which are ready to read messages from the consumer. All of the consumers do the same job and could be mutually exchanged. When a consumer receives a message the message will be deleted and the other consumers won’t see it anymore. The next available consumer will get the next message and so on.
MESSAGING SYSTEMS
Knowing some of the different messaging patterns, let us have a look at some of the surviving messaging systems.
MOSQUITTO
Mosquitto is a lightweight MQTT broker supporting the publish-subscribe pattern. It does not support competing consumers or other protocols apart from MQTT. Mosquitto is accessible in the software repository of most Linux distributions.
If there is no pre-built package available or the user do not want to use them, the user can also install it from source code. The user has to make sure that he/she have the ares.h available on their system. Depending on the distribution this is included in a package called c-ares or libc-ares-dev.
If the user has installed mosquitto from their package manager, the user should be able to start it with the standard daemon manager (systemd, SysVinit). Otherwise, it’s as simple as calling mosquitto to start the server and it will greet you with:
1509264671: mosquitto version 1.4.14 (build date 2017-10-29 08:06:39+0000) starting
1509264671: Using default config.
1509264671: Opening ipv4 listen socket on port 1883.
1509264671: Opening ipv6 listen socket on port 1883.
If the user has executed make && and install during compilation of mosquitto, libmosquitto.so.1 and will be installed to /usr/local/lib/libmosquitto.so.1. The user can now try to run the client programs mosquitto_sub or mosquitto_pub, this might give the error:
mosquitto_sub: error while loading shared libraries: libmosquitto.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
For communication with Mosquitto the user should be able to use any MQTT client library. There are command line clients available from mosquitto called mosquitto_pub and mosquitto_sub.
ZEROMQ
What if the user wants to support more messaging patterns than Mosquitto, but still want to have a lightweight solution? Then ZeroMQ might be the best option to go. Unlike all other solutions in this series, ZeroMQ is not a central server, but just a library which the user can use in the client programs. It looks similar to standard networking from a user’s perspective, but in the background it handles the overhead of network communication.
ZeroMQ does support both the publish-subscribe and the competing consumers pattern, but since it does not have a central server, the user will have to write a simple server in ZeroMQ if the user wants to have many connections.
PUBLISH-SUBSCRIBE
ZeroMQ is simple to install, because it is just a library. For Python, we can get it from pip with:
pip install zmq
The publish-subscribe pattern works quite alike to MQTT. The only difference is that with ZeroMQ the user cannot subscribe to topics, but instead the user subscribes to a message prefix.