qpid.apache.org/electron is a simple API for writing concurrent AMQP clients and servers.
qpid.apache.org/proton is an event-driven, concurrent-unsafe Go wrapper for the proton-C library. The electron package provides a more Go-friendly concurrent API built on top of proton.
See A Tale of Two Brokers for a comparison of the two APIs.
If you have the proton-C library and headers installed you can get the latest go packages with
go get qpid.apache.org/electron
If Proton-C is installed in a non-standard place (other than /usr or /usr/local) you should set these environment variables before go get:
export CGO_LDFLAGS="-L/<my-proton>/lib[64]" export CGO_CFLAGS="-I/<my-proton>/include" go get qpid.apache.org/electron
If you have a proton build you don't need to go get, you can set your GOPATH to use the binding from the checkout with:
source <path-to-proton>/config.sh
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 on the default AMQP port 5672 (the optional -debug flag will print extra information about what the broker is doing)
go run broker.go -addr=:5672 -debug # Use a different port if 5672 is not available.
Send messages concurrently to queues “foo” and “bar”, 10 messages to each queue:
go run send.go -count 10 amqp://localhost:5672/foo amqp://localhost:5672/bar
Receive messages concurrently from “foo” and “bar”. Note -count 20 for 10 messages each on 2 queues:
go run receive.go -count 20 amqp://localhost:5672/foo amqp://localhost:5672/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 other Proton examples available you can try communicating between programs in in different languages. For example use the python broker with Go clients:
python ../python/broker.py go run send.go -count 10 localhost:/foo localhost:/bar
Or use the Go broker and the python clients:
go run broker.go -debug python ../python/simple_send.py python ../python/simple_recv.py
The proton and electron packages provide two different APIs for building AMQP applications. For most applications, electron is easier to use.
The examples proton/broker.go and electron/broker.go implement the same simple broker 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.go is less than half as long as the proton/broker.go illustrating why it is better suited for most Go applications.
proton/broker.go implements an event-driven loop per connection that reacts to events like ‘incoming link’, ‘incoming message’ and ‘sender has credit’. It uses channels to exchange data between the event-loop goroutine for each connection and shared queues that are accessible to all connections. Sending messages is particularly tricky, the broker must monitor the queue for available messages and the sender link for available credit.
electron/broker.go does not need any “upside-down” event-driven code, it is implemented as straightforward loops. The broker is a loop listening for connections. Each connection is a loop accepting for incoming sender or receiver links. Each receiving link is a loop that receives a message and pushes it to a queue. Each sending link is a loop that pops a message from a queue and sends it.
Queue bounds and credit manage themselves: popping from a queue blocks till there is a message, sending blocks until there is credit, receiving blocks till something is received and pushing onto a queue blocks until there is space. There's no need for code that monitors the state of multiple queues and links. Each loop has one simple job to do, and the Go run-time schedules them efficiently.