Msglite is a lightweight messaging daemon with a built-in http proxy. Here are a few of its strengths:
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Msglite makes IPC really painless. It handles all of the queuing so both senders and receivers of messages can be very simple.
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The Msglite protocol is very easy to comprehend. If there isn't a Msglite client for your language of choice, implementing one should only take a few hours.
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Msglite brings modern concurrency patterns like Scala's actors or Go's channels to your existing software stack.
Msglite can also act as an HTTP proxy server designed to run upstream from servers like Nginx. Msglite receives incoming HTTP requests and forwards them as messages to your HTTP handlers, which are simply Msglite clients.
In this capacity, Msglite serves as a replacement for things like FastCGI.
The primary advantages of this approach are:
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An HTTP request handler can reply to requests in an order other than the order in which they were received. It can even forward a request to another Msglite client which can handle the reply on its own. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for writing real-time "Comet" applications.
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Your HTTP request handlers can gracefully restart without dropping queued requests.
Wrapping your existing web-application in a Msglite HTTP handler is surprisingly easy, and in the near future, we'll have Plack, Rack, and WSGI wrappers for Perl, Ruby, and Python, respectively.
Msglite is written in the Go programming language, so you'll have to install it first:
http://golang.org/doc/install.html
Then download and build msglite like this:
$ git clone git://github.com/willconant/msglite.git
$ cd msglite
$ make
Start msglite like this:
$ ./msglite
Documentation and an up-to-date list of client libraries are available on the Wiki:
http://wiki.github.com/willconant/msglite/
Copyright © 2010 William R. Conant, http://WillConant.com/