CERN Accelerating science

Since its inception in 2007, ZeroMQ has defined a new product category of thin, fast, open source message transports. This little library has now grown into a large, vibrant community of projects tied together with standard protocols and APIs. Applications, written in any language, talk to each other over TCP, multicast, or inproc transports, using a single socket-based API, and a set of "patterns" (pub-sub, request-reply, dealer-router, pipeline). ZeroMQ handles message framing, batching, and I/O, but ignores aspects like serialization and persistence. By focussing on the essentials, and acting as a toolkit rather than a pre-packaged solution, ZeroMQ turns the complex problem of distributed computing into a relatively simple recipe.

Pieter Hintjens is a writer, programmer, and public speaker who has spent decades building large software systems, organizations, and businesses. He designed the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) in 2006 for JPMorganChase and left the protocol committee with his team in 2009. In 2007 he founded Wikidot Inc, a cloud service with over 1M users. In the same year he also founded the ZeroMQ open source project and has helped steer that community ever since.

He is the author of a book, "ZeroMQ" from O'Reilly, and of the "Code Connected" series of books.

He's been a strong critic of the patent system, leading the European effort to ban software patents from 2005 to 2007.

His company, iMatix, provides support to the ZeroMQ market, and in this role he's traveled the world, teaching, coaching and helping others to organize successfully.

He defined the term "social architecture" as the process, and the product, of planning, designing, and growing an online community, and has promoted the techniques of social architecture in articles and at conferences.