Zed Shaw's Advanced Network Architectures With ZeroMQ at Pycon 2011 [video]

Is there some text available somewhere (slides, perhaps)?

Is it Zed Shaw week on HN or something?

Can't watch the video right away, but I'll just say that every time I read the ZeroMQ guide (http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all) I am frustrated by the lack of any clear technical explanation of ZeroMQ's basic architecture.

Today I gave it another shot, and after half an hour of trying to glean technical detail and skipping any parts that read like a like a comic book ("zap-pow-kaboom satori paradigm-shift moment"), I think I've learned the following:

    * ZMQ works by spawning a background thread that runs a
      poll() (or equivalent)-based async I/O loop.  This thread
      is created when you create a ZMQ "context."

    * On top of a context you can create a ZMQ "socket", which
      may map to N underlying UNIX sockets (or a comparable
      transport), and which will transparently queue data to slow
      or unavailable receivers.

    * Over a socket you can send or receive "messages", which
      are length-delimited strings which are always delivered
      in full with the original length. Send/receive can be
      either blocking or non-blocking.

    * Contexts can be shared across threads, but sockets are
      not thread-safe.  Communication between application threads
      and the ZMQ I/O thread is via a lock-free queue.

The main features seem to be topology-agnostic programming (since you don't have to know what a socket is connected to to send/receive over it) and transparent queuing. In my opinion transparent queues can be problematic because they transparently use up memory that can be hard to account for. Topology-agnostic programming certainly seems interesting, but in my experience of distributed systems programming I never seem to need or want complex messaging topologies. I guess I don't really get what all the hype is about. Maybe I should watch the video.

All of your reasons make sense to me, it's just that all the advocacy docs set ZMQ up to be this game-changing system. I can totally buy "a fairly simple wrapper about sockets that makes life easier for me." "world-saving superheros of the networking world" not so much.

I don't think there's much to gain (at least right now) by using zmq in a simple single-client -> server setup.

I read the testimonials, which got me excited, so I then tried to make use of zmq in a system I was working on. Using plain old sockets, I could whip up a connection in a few lines (OK, python helps here), and deal with all failure modes associated with them. Mapping this robust setup to zmq, required multiple layers, async requests, and a polling mechanism. I don't recall now, but I may have had to throw a router in there as well. I'm not dissing zmq, as it's a great technology, and solves some complex problems well, but it's not for everyone, and people without complex problems will more likely be confused by it than helped.

The documentation is OK, but I think tries to abstract too much of what's going on, and just leaves you with a bunch of less-than-descriptive names for things that you have to take for granted. All the mamas, papas, and dealers analogies didn't help me at all.