The SitePoint PHP blog has published a new tutorial today by Miguel Ibarra Romero introducing you to the RabbitMQ queuing tool and shows you how to use it in PHP-based applications via the php-amqplib library.

AMQP (Advanced Message Queueing Protocol) is a network protocol that can deliver messages from one application endpoint to another application endpoint. It does not care about the platform or language of said applications, as long as they support AMQP. [...] The advantage of having a message broker such as RabbitMQ, and AMQP being a network protocol, is that the producer, the broker, and the consumer can live on different physical/virtual servers on different geographic locations.

With some of the introductions out of the way (common terms, flow of the data, etc) he walks through the installation of the RabbitMQ software on your system. He uses a Ubuntu install, but the commands could be easily ported for other distributions. From there he shows how to install the PHP library and a simple example of a pizza ordering system where orders are sent to be processed offline. Complete code is included to make the "SimpleSender" class and push the request out to the queue. With that working, he also shows how to create a SimpleReceiver class that consumes the data from the queue and sends the data to be processed.