ZeroMQ (0MQ) is a beautiful library that basically replaces the socket layer with a very thin, pattern-based wrapper. Aside from removing this overhead from your code, 0MQ also usually gives you the guarantee that one read will return one message (or one part of a multipart message).

gevent is a coroutine-based networking library for Python. Coroutines allow you to leverage the blocking that certain types of operations, like network requests, to perform other operations while waiting (works best when you’re doing a number of similar operations in parallel). It’s a compromise that allows you to speed up synchronous operations to the point of being comparable to multithreading (at least in the case of network operations).

There was a point at which ZeroMQ didn’t support this (and a package named gevent_zmq had to be used), but it has since become compatible with it.

For example, a server:

import gevent

import zmq.green as zmq

_BINDING = 'ipc:///tmp/test_server'

context = zmq.Context()

def server():
    server_socket = context.socket(zmq.REP)
    server_socket.bind(_BINDING)

    while 1:
        received = server_socket.recv()
        print("Received:\n[%s]" % (received))
        print('')

        server_socket.send('TestResponse')

server = gevent.spawn(server)
server.join()

The corresponding client:

import gevent

import zmq.green as zmq

_BINDING = 'ipc:///tmp/test_server'

context = zmq.Context()

def client():
    client_socket = context.socket(zmq.REQ)
    client_socket.connect(_BINDING)

    client_socket.send("TestMessage")

    response = client_socket.recv()
    print("Response:\n[%s]" % (response))
    print('')

client = gevent.spawn(client)
client.join()

Displaying the output here would nearly be redundant, given that the result should be plainly obvious.