A simplistic queue server written in Go.

takeanumber is an in-memory networked queue server, allowing you to delay processing by storing messages in one process & consuming those messages in other processes.

This is especially useful in web applications, allowing you to take non-critical processing out of the request-response cycle, though there are many other applications.

takeanumber exposes its functionality over a plain-text protocol via a TCP socket. These messages conform to a subset of the Redis Serialization Protocol (http://redis.io/topics/protocol), so in theory an existing Redis client may be able to talk to takeanumber.

Starting a server (on localhost, port 13331):

$ takeanumber -p 13331

You can then use tools like telnet to talk to takeanumber. Here's a sample session:

$ telnet localhost 13331
LEN my_queue
:0
ADD my_queue 0 Hello, world!
+bb713fbe-3c82-41c9-94f0-43c499bfac8c
ADD my_queue 3 {"user_id": 5, "action": "send_welcome_email"}
+4aaf88df-390b-4a0a-8352-1fe258d94d3d
LEN my_queue
:2
RESERVE my_queue
+bb713fbe-3c82-41c9-94f0-43c499bfac8c Hello, world!
DONE my_queue bb713fbe-3c82-41c9-94f0-43c499bfac8c
+OK
LEN my_queue
:1
RESERVE my_queue
+4aaf88df-390b-4a0a-8352-1fe258d94d3d {"user_id": 5, "action": "send_welcome_email"}
RETRY my_queue 4aaf88df-390b-4a0a-8352-1fe258d94d3d
+OK
LEN my_queue
:1
CLOSE

This session did the following:

• Checked the length of queue, bringing it into existence if not present
• Added a "Hello, world!" message to the queue with no retries
• Added a JSON message to the queue with 3 retries
• Verified the length of the queue
• Reserved the first item for processing then marked it as done
• Reserved the second item, then marked it to be retried
• Verified the message was in the queue
• Closed the session

takeanumber was built using Go 1.4+.

$ go get code.google.com/p/go-uuid/uuid
$ go build takeanumber.go

New BSD

TBD

• STATS command & statistics tracking
• QUEUES command to return the queue names
• Proper Go-based benchmarks