[rabbitmq-discuss] Ruby and AMQP

[Mark]

Morning all,

I have some questions regarding the use of RabbitMQ or even AMQP in 
general. Our main application is written in Ruby on Rails and we have a 
bunch of auxiliary services (search, recommendations, emailing, image 
resizing, etc). For our queuing needs we are currently using a Redis 
backed queing system (Resque) and for communications between services we 
are using JSON. I am looking into AMQP/RabbitMQ to see if can be of any 
use. The only problem is I don't see why AMQP should replace what we 
have now.

For example Resque is a great queuing system. We simply throw a job into 
the queue and have it completed by one of our workers which is dead 
simple to spawn... ie, just tell Resque how many workers you want for 
job X. In RabbitMQ or the Ruby-AMQP gem I don't see how this is easily 
accomplished. How would I spawn multiple workers without each of them 
loading up the full Rails environment? Is there anything to manage all 
of these workers?

Secondly, I know RabbitMQ is way more than just a simple queuing system 
but when it comes to RPC what are the benefits over a simple restful or 
JSON approach?

I was hoping someone can shed some light on these questions. It would 
also be very helpful if some ruby users out there could explain how you 
are using AMQP and why you chose it over alternative options?

Thanks.

- M