[erlang-questions] Erlang and MSMQ

[Tim Watson]

On 2 February 2011 03:59, Marcel Meyer <marcel.meyer@REDACTED> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I was wondering if anyone was ever successful in publishing to a MSMQ from
> Erlang and how they did it.
>
> Regards,
> Marcel
>

You might want to look at comet (the erl_com erlang <=> COM bridge
component). I'm guessing you can access MSMQ using COM. It'll be a
pretty low level interface, but there won't be much overhead as
erl_com can run either as an external port program (using stdio to
talk to the driver) or a linked-in driver running in the same process
space as the emulator. Running  a linked-in driver is going to be the
lowest overhead, but there are risks of course.

Also if you're .NET inclined, then a guy on this list has been doing
recent work on .NET/Erlang interoperability, so you could write a
wrapper around MSMQ in C# (or whatever CLI language takes your fancy)
and call it from Erlang. There will be some overhead with this because
there will need to be I/O between the Erlang node(s) and the .NET
*node* - but it might make for a clean interface and on the .NET side
you should be able to expose the MSMQ endpoint very easily with WCF.

A third option might be to write/configure the MQ client part in a
.NET language, export a COM Callable Wrapper and consume that via
erl_com, thereby getting your cake (i.e., to write the bulk of your
code in something reasonable like F# or C#) and eat it - minimising
hops and getting good performance. Doing that in linked-in driver mode
is probably a very bad idea though - who knows how two runtime would
interact in this scenario. Once you've gone to a port program (for the
reason I mentioned), moving to a .NET node(s) might be worth the
performance overhead.

All my suggests are based on pure guesswork anyway - I've never tried
to do this before. I have no idea the status of erl_com, although the
other .NET integration I mentioned looks fairly active - it is called
ExtendedVisualOtp IIRC.

Anyway, good luck, and please do post back when you figure out what
works! I've been thinking about the same issues for bridging to JMS
providers (where currently I use AMQP and convert to JMS using apache
camel) so it'll be interesting to see how the MS route turns out.