Brandon Savage has posted a quick overview of working with PHP and RabbitMQ for queuing. This is the first part of a three-part series about using these two technologies together effectively.

There are many times that you want to write background processes and queue up the tasks so that they can be handled in sequential order. There are any number of queues available for software developers, and one that I’ve really taken a liking to is RabbitMQ. Besides the fact that the queue is designed to requeue messages that are unsuccessfully delivered, RabbitMQ is fast and efficient.

He introduces some of the basic concepts behind working with RabbitMQ (like connections and channels) and an "exchange" - the method by which messages are routed. He talks about pushing messages to the exchange to be handled and how you consume the queue for updates. He also links to the various things you'll need to install to start combining these two tools including the AMPQ PECL extension.