There are 3 Go packages for proton:
proton and electron are alternative APIs for sending messages. proton is a direct wrapping of the concurrent-unsafe, event-driven C proton API. electron is a procedural, concurrent-safe interface that may be more convenient and familiar for Go programmers. The examples proton/broker.go and electron/broker.go give an illustration of how the APIs differ.
electron
proton
Use go get qpid.apache.org/electron or check out the proton repository and set your GOPATH environment variable to include /<path-to-proton>/proton-c/bindings/go
The proton Go packages include C code so the cgo compiler needs to be able to find the proton library and include files. There are a couple of ways to do this:
Build proton in directory $BUILD. Source the script $BUILD/config.sh to set your environment.
Install proton to a standard prefix such as /usr or /usr/local. No need for further settings.
Install proton to a non-standard prefix $PREFIX. Set the following:
export LIBRARY_PATH=$PREFIX/lib:$LIBRARY_PATH export C_INCLUDE_PATH=$PREFIX/include:$C_INCLUDE_PATH export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$PREFIX/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Once you are set up, the go tools will work as normal. You can see documentation in your web browser at localhost:6060 by running:
godoc -http=:6060
You can run the examples directly from source like this:
go run <program>.go
This is a little slow (a couple of seconds) as it compiles the program and runs it in one step. You can compile the program first and then run the executable to avoid the delay:
go build <program>.go ./<program>
All the examples take a -h flag to show usage information, and the comments in the example source have more details.
First start the broker (the optional -debug flag will print extra information about what the broker is doing)
go run broker.go -debug
Send messages concurrently to queues “foo” and “bar”, 10 messages to each queue:
go run send.go -count 10 localhost:/foo localhost:/bar
Receive messages concurrently from “foo” and “bar”. Note -count 20 for 10 messages each on 2 queues:
go run receive.go -count 20 localhost:/foo localhost:/bar
The broker and clients use the standard AMQP port (5672) on the local host by default, to use a different address use the -addr host:port flag.
If you have the full proton repository checked out you can try try using the python broker with Go clients:
python ../python/broker.py
Or use the Go broker and the python clients:
python ../python/simple_send.py python ../python/simple_recv.py
The proton and electron packages provide two alternate APIs for AMQP applications. See the proton Go README for a discussion of why there are two APIs.
The examples proton/broker.go and electron/broker.go both implement the same simple broker-like functionality using each of the two APIs. They both handle multiple connections concurrently and store messages on bounded queues implemented by Go channels.
However the electron/broker is less than half as long as the proton/broker illustrating why it is better suited for most Go applications.
proton/broker must explicitly handle proton events, which are processed in a single goroutine per connection since proton is not concurrent safe. Each connection uses channels to exchange messages between the event-handling goroutine and the shared queues that are accessible to all connections. Sending messages is particularly tricky since we must monitor the queue for available messages and the sending link for available credit in order to send messages.
electron/broker takes advantage of the electron package, which hides all the event handling and passing of messages between goroutines beind behind straightforward interfaces for sending and receiving messages. The electron broker can implement links as simple goroutines that loop popping messages from a queue and sending them or receiving messages and pushing them to a queue.