Message Queues for Buffering: An IronMQ and Python Case Study

Using IronMQ and Python to as a Buffer between Systems

Connecting systems and moderating data flows between them is not an easy task. Message queues are designed for just this purpose – buffering data between systems so that each can operate independently and asynchronously.

Here’s a short article on using IronMQ to buffer a CMS system from real estate data from a listing service. The app developer uses Python for the bridge code between the service and the CMS system.

Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Building a System with IronMQ and Python

One of my most recent projects was writing a system to deliver real estate listing data to a content management system. Since the listing data source was bursty and I wasn’t sure how the CMS would handle the load, I decided to use a message queue, where the messages would have a JSON payload. Message queues are great at decoupling components of a system.

For the queue, I used IronMQ. The company already was using it, it has a free tier (up to 24 messages a second), the service has been stable and reliable, it has great language SDKs, and setting up a durable message queue is something I’d rather outsource…

I wrote the bridge code from the listing database to the message queue in python. The shop was mostly Java and some Python, and Python seemed a better fit for a small ‘pull from here, push to there’ application…

[F]or this kind of problem, Python was a great solution. And I’ll reach for IronMQ any time I need a message queue. This pair of technologies was quick to implement, easy to deploy, and high performance wasn’t really a requirement, since the frequency of the listing delivery was the real bottleneck.

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About the Author

Dan Moore is a developer of web applications. Since 1999, Dan has created a variety of web sites and web applications, from ecommerce to portal to user self-service. He is competent in PHP, Java, perl, SQL, GWT, and object oriented design.