PHP & SOAP what use is a message broker?

Question

I'm working on a solution to make certain data from a large database available to a remote website. My first thought was to simply cook up some soap web services to fetch certain data from the database. This could be done in just a few line, for instance like this, with the user of Zend_Soap_Server:

class MyClass 
{
    public function getlastname($id) 
    {
        $dbh = new PDO("oci:dbname=bigdb", "theuser", "thepass");

        $stmt = $dbh->prepare("select lastname from person where id  = :id"); 

        if ($stmt->execute(array(':id',$id))) 
        {
         $row = $stmt->fetch();
         return $row['lastname'];
        }
    }
}

$server = new Zend_Soap_Server(null, $options);
$server->setClass('MyClass');
$server->setObject(new MyClass());

$server->handle();

Now someone told me to also have a look at message brokers / queues. I've been taking a look at some software like apache activeMQ, stomp and zend_queue but I didn't really get a clear view what they should be used for and weather they would be useful in this project.

I do understand that my implementation could have some drawbacks, like a sluggish website when the database is not responding quickly and a high load on the database when there are coming lots of requests from the website, would a message broker be able to prevent such complications?

Answer 1

Hello,

The role of a message broker is to check the requests and dispatch them to the right service or return a response from a cache.

If you are expecting large traffic you probably should consider using a message broker.

Regards, Alin