Name

Starling - a light weight server for reliable distributed message passing.

Description

Starling is a powerful but simple messaging server that enables reliable distributed queuing with an absolutely minimal overhead. It speaks the MemCache protocol for maximum cross-platform compatibility. Any language that speaks MemCache can take advantage of Starling’s queue facilities.

Installation

This fork of the Starling source is hosted at GitHub and can be found at:

http://github.com/advany/starling/tree/master

The original source was to be found at RubyForge but no longer exists there.

GitHub serves gems prefixed by a username to differentiate different forks.
This project can be installed with:

# THIS COMMAND ONE TIME ONLY
gem sources -a http://gems.github.com/

# As often as you like
sudo gem install advany-starling

See http://gems.github.com/ if you want more info about GitHub and gems.

Quick Start Usage

# View the Starling help and usage message
starling --help

# In a console window start the Starling server.  By default
# it runs verbosely in the foreground, listening on 127.0.0.1:22122
# and stores its files under /tmp/starling:
starling

# In a new console test the put and get of messages on a queue:

irb
>> require 'starling'
=> true
>> starling = Starling.new('127.0.0.1:22122')
=> MemCache: 1 servers, 1 buckets, ns: nil, ro: false
>> starling.set('my_queue', 12345)
=> nil
>> starling.get('my_queue')
=> 12345

# You can do a simple loop over a queue with something like:
>> loop { puts starling.get('my_queue'); sleep 1 }
12345
nil
nil
...

For more information run the following in a new console:

'gem server'

This will start a gem server on http://localhost:8808/ which you can view in your
browser to see the RDocs for the gem. Or generate rdocs by running the following
in a new console:

'rdoc'

Known Issues

Starling is “slow” as far as messaging systems are concerned. In practice, it’s fast enough.

TODO

Implement memcached in stead of memcache as a client interface
Improve client structure (with workers - simplify and add defaults)
Fix running starling_client as deamonized process (can’t seem to fork inside a fork)

Authors

Blaine Cook <[email protected]>
Chris Wanstrath <[email protected]>
AnotherBritt <?>
Glenn Rempe <?>
Abdul-Rahman Advany <[email protected]>