Example Distributed Queue using Zookeeper (via Curator)

We use Storm for distributed processing.  We've been using JMS as a means of driving work into Storm via the spout we developed:
https://github.com/hmsonline/storm-jms

But since Storm uses Zookeeper under the hood, we thought we could perhaps use Zookeeper instead of JMS for certain low-throughput distributed messaging needs, thereby decreasing the number of technologies we needed to maintain in our stack for certain applications.

Fortunately, there is a Distributed Queue recipe for Zookeeper.

Even better, Netflix has bundled an implementation of this recipe into Curator.

The docs for the Curator recipe were adequate, but I didn't see a complete example.  After some muddling around, I was able to get it working.  You can find the code here:
https://github.com/boneill42/zookeeper-distributed-queue-example

In the end, the throughput was just too slow. (You could see the messages scroll by on the screen as they were being consumed)

Eventually, I punted and decided to take a look at Kafka.  That experiment is going *extremely* well.  Kafka is very impressive.  More on that in a future post. =)