Alvaro Videla has a new post today showing how he used RabbitMQ in his unit testing runs with a small, quickly installed version of the server that can be removed once the tests are complete.

In this blog post I want to show you a very simple technique for using RabbitMQ in our Unit or Functional Tests. Let's say you wrote a bunch of tests for your RabbitMQ consumers and then it's time to run them. To do that you probably need to setup a RabbitMQ server just for tests with their own users and passwords, or you need to set up a whole new virtual host for your tests. [...] With a future release of RabbitMQ that we can already test on the nightlies website, we can run RabbitMQ without the need to install Erlang. We created a package that ships a stripped down version of Erlang together with the broker bits, so running RabbitMQ now is as easy as downloading a tarball, uncompressing it and starting the server.

With a combination of this more self-contained package and some listener handling through PHPUnit, they uncompress the tarball with a PHP script and start the server with the defined configuration. Then, once the tests are done, it cleans itself up and removes the entire server directory to make for a clean run the next time.

On PHPMaster.com today they've posted a new tutorial that helps you get started adding queuing to your application with PHP and RabbitMQ.

RabbitMQ is open-source message brokering software written in Erlang. The MQ in its name refers to a standard known as Advanced Message Queuing Protocol. For our purposes, and most others, it acts as a middleman between producer (sending) and consumer (receiving) programs - it simply accepts and forwards messages. [...] Both producers and consumers can be written in any language that has an available RabbitMQ or AMQP client library. In this article, I'll demo a producer program written in PHP and a consuming program in Python.

He walks you through the installation for both RabbitMQ itself and the PHP (php-amqlib) and Python (pika) tools to use for the interfaces. There's some details on how the queuing system works and the code for the sample clients is included as well as commands to use the two clients to send/receive messages.

Artur Ejsmont has a new post sharing some benchmarks he put together about the "messages per second" and "time to execute" when using PHP to pull from various messaging backends.

I have looked at the state of different messaging backends recently and i ran a little benchmark to see what is the rough comparison of message publishing throughput. Results that i got are quite surprising. What i wanted to achieve is some sort of reassurance before choosing a messaging bus for my PHP project.

Running both the PHP and the messaging test scripts on the same server, he pulled from a few different backend systems - RabbitMQ, MySQL, MongoDb, Memcached and ActiveMQ. The results were interesting, showing an interesting result in the time it took to execute versus the number of messages per second pushed in.

Mfana Ronald Conco has posted the second part of his RabbitMQ and PHP series to his blog today. This time he looks at durable queues and persistent messages

You now have a queuing system that works and generates pdfs which are sent to users as per RabbitMQ and PHP Part 1 of this article. A week later after launching the queuing system you get one or two queries from users who claim to have made a request to get the pdf report but it never arrived. Okay, what could have happened ? well you go through the application log files and as suspected - An Exception was thrown by one your classes as the consumer was trying to create the pdf and that is why it was never sent. Now this compromises the queuing system Totally, But wait there is a way to help prevent such.

He shows how to make your queues "durable", meaning they'll survive a broker restart and they require a response from the consumer before being removed. He shows how (via the php-ampq functionality) to add the "AMPQ_DURABLE" flag to the queue definition. He also includes some code showing how to send back the acknowledgement so the entry can be removed from the queue. He also includes an update to the code that calls "publish" to make the messages persistent too.

In this recent blog post Mfana Ronald Conco looks at combining the RabbitMQ messaging service with PHP, complete with all of the setup instructions (and configuration) you'll need.

There are times when you have to make certain features of your PHP application to work asynchronously, and there are times when you do not have to - I will explain this better by introducing every day scenarios.

His two scenarios have a common thread - the need for asynchronous processing, especially for something that can scale as the user base grows. With the help of RabbitMQ he shows you how to install the MW server, get the php-ampq extension for PHP installed and two sample scripts - one to send a message to the broker, the other to receive and parse the result of a job.

In a new post Bradley Holt looks at some of his exploration into the combination of RabbitMQ and PHP as a possible platform for messaging between process (or applications).

I'm exploring the possibility of using RabbitMQ for an upcoming project. RabbitMQ is a free/open source message broker platform. It uses the open Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard and is written in Erlang using the Open Telecom Platform (OTP). It promises a high level of availability, throughput, scalability, and portability. Since it is built using open standards, it is interoperable with other messaging systems and can be accessed from any platform.

He goes through the full process - installing RabbitMQ via MacPorts, grabbing the latest copy of the librabbitmq library and installing it and finally installing the AMQP extension for PHP so they can communicate. He includes some simple code that connects to the queue and sends a "hello world" message out to the connection bound to "routeA".