The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the second part of their IronMQ and Laravel series, part 3: IronMQ and Laravel: Delays and Retries. In this latest post Rajiv Seelam looks at how to get the Laravel-based application to overcome some of the limitations of the system.

Previously, we saw how to use Iron push queues with Laravel. All we needed to do was set up an Iron account, add a subscriber URL, push a message to queue, and receive the message. The way Laravel supports Iron push queues out-of-the-box is amazing, but there are always limitations. In this article we focus on those limitations and learn to tackle them.

He briefly talks about the three different scenarios: the happy path where everything works, the job fails and the job being a long running process. He then walks you through code that covers each of these scenarios using subscribers and the IronMQ PHP library for successful handling. He shows the push of a message then how to handle delays and retries, defining them in the job configuration.

The SitePoint PHP blog has started off a series of posts showing you how to integrate the IronMQ queueing system with a Laravel framework-based application. In this first post of the series, Rajiv Seelam introduces some of the basic concepts and helps get things set up to work with the queue.

This two-part article series aims to make a beginner understand using push queues with Laravel. To give a brief overview, the final solution which we will be looking at is a simple form to upload photos and resize them. Resizing images is a time consuming task, so instead of making a user wait until the image is resized we can do it in the background. At the same time, we’ll learn to use a tool called ngrok so that we can use queues in our local system.

Their example application and the Iron.io service for handling the queuing. They walk you through the setup of the Laravel project and the installation of the other necessary libraries (including ngrok for tunneling to your localhost). Finally, they help you set up the Iron.io connection with the necessary keys and how to get Laravel to subscribe to the default queue.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post looking at using message queues in PHP. More specifically it compares a few of the different solutions out there and their advantages/disadvantages - Beanstalkd, IronMQ and the Amazon SQS.

This article introduces the concept of message queues and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of three specific message queue services: Beanstalkd, IronMQ and Amazon SQS. [...] Queues allow you to store metadata for processing jobs at a later date. They can aid in the development of SOA (service-oriented architecture) by providing the flexibility to defer tasks to separate processes. When applied correctly, queues can dramatically increase the user experience of a web site by reducing load times.

He starts with some of the overall benefits and downfalls of using a queueing system in your application, including some common use cases. From their he breaks it up into sections, in each talking about the option and how it differs from the others:

• Services
• Server setup
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Architecture
• Client libraries
• Management interface
• Redundancy
• Security
• Speed
• Fidelity
• One-time pickup

...and many, many more. If you're looking for a good, complete overview of how these three options compare on a wide range of features and configurations, definitely check out this post. It even includes some PHP close to the end to make the connections to each and send/receive messages.