mtortonesi/ruby-czmq

My attempt at building a Ruby-FFI library for CZMQ

ruby-czmq

ruby-czmq is my attempt at building a Ruby bindings gem for the CZMQ library.

ruby-czmq realizes a convenient and relatively elegant API on top of the FFI-based ruby-czmq-ffi gem, which provides low-level bindings to CZMQ and works on all the main Ruby VMs: YARV/MRI, JRuby, and Rubinius.

Motivation

One could wonder whether there was actually the need for a third gem (in addition to ffi-rzmq and the more outdated and YARV/MRI-specific rbzmq) providing Ruby bindings for ZeroMQ.

The fact is that both ffi-rzmq and rzmq are bindings for the ZeroMQ library. ZeroMQ is an awesome library, but it provides a rather low-level API designed for C/C++ and relatively difficult to make available to Ruby applications through a convenient and elegant interface. Instead, ruby-czmq provides bindings to CZMQ, a library that was specifically designed to provide a higher-level API to the ZeroMQ functions and that is significantly more Ruby-friendly than ZeroMQ. In addition, CZMQ provides functions, such as service discovery and cryptography, that are not present in ZeroMQ.

By interfacing with CZMQ, instead of ZeroMQ, ruby-czmq can provide many of the functions of ffi-rzmq and rbzmq with significantly less code.

Installation

Stable version

You can get the stable version of ruby-czmq by installing the czmq gem from RubyGems:

gem install czmq

Development version

If you want to try the development version of ruby-czmq, instead, just place these lines:

gem 'czmq-ffi', git: 'https://github.com/mtortonesi/ruby-czmq-ffi.git'
gem 'czmq', git: 'https://github.com/mtortonesi/ruby-czmq.git'

in your Gemfile and run:

bundle install

Examples

You can find some simple examples that demonstrate how to use the ruby-czmq api in the examples directory of this project.

License

MIT