» Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. By using Amazon SQS, developers can simply move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks, without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS makes it easy to build an automated workflow, working in close conjunction with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the other AWS infrastructure web services.

Amazon SQS works by exposing Amazon's web-scale messaging infrastructure as a web service. Any computer on the Internet can add or read messages without any installed software or special firewall configurations. Components of applications using Amazon SQS can run independently, and do not need to be on the same network, developed with the same technologies, or running at the same time.

Before you can get started with Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs, you must first register for an account. Please see the » SQS FAQ page on the Amazon website for more information.

After registering, you will receive an application key and a secret key. You will need both to access the SQS service.

The Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs class provides the PHP wrapper to the Amazon SQS REST interface. Please consult the » Amazon SQS documentation for detailed description of the service. You will need to be familiar with basic concepts in order to use this service.

Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs provides the following functionality:

• A single point for configuring your amazon.sqs authentication credentials that can be used across the amazon.sqs namespaces.

• A proxy object that is more convenient to use than an HTTP client alone, mostly removing the need to manually construct HTTP POST requests to access the REST service.

• A response wrapper that parses each response body and throws an exception if an error occurred, alleviating the need to repeatedly check the success of many commands.

• Additional convenience methods for some of the more common operations.

Once you have registered with Amazon SQS, you're ready to create your queue and store some messages on SQS. Each queue can contain unlimited amount of messages, identified by name.

The following example demonstrates creating a queue, storing and retrieving messages.

Since the Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs service requires authentication, you should pass your credentials (AWS key and secret key) to the constructor. If you only use one account, you can set default credentials for the service:

All messages SQS are stored in queues. A queue has to be created before any message operations. Queue names must be unique under your access key and secret key.

Queue names can contain lowercase letters, digits, periods (.), underscores (_), and dashes (-). No other symbols allowed. Queue names can be a maximum of 80 characters.

• create() creates a new queue.

• delete() removes all messages in the queue.

  Example #2 Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs Queue Removal Example

  1. $sqs = new Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs($my_aws_key, $my_aws_secret_key);
  2. $queue_url = $sqs->create('test_1');
  3. $sqs->delete($queue_url);

• count() gets the approximate number of messages in the queue.

  Example #3 Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs Queue Count Example

  1. $sqs = new Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs($my_aws_key, $my_aws_secret_key);
  2. $queue_url = $sqs->create('test_1');
  3. $sqs->send($queue_url, 'this is a test');
  4. $count = $sqs->count($queue_url); // Returns '1'

• getQueues() returns the list of the names of all queues belonging to the user.

  Example #4 Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs Queue Listing Example

  1. $sqs = new Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs($my_aws_key, $my_aws_secret_key);
  2. $list = $sqs->getQueues();
  3. foreach($list as $queue) {
  4.    echo "I have queue $queue\n";
  5. }

After a queue is created, simple messages can be sent into the queue then received at a later point in time. Messages can be up to 8KB in length. If longer messages are needed please see » S3. There is no limit to the number of messages a queue can contain.

• sent($queue_url, $message) send the $message to the $queue_url SQS queue URL.

  Example #5 Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs Message Send Example

  1. $sqs = new Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs($my_aws_key, $my_aws_secret_key);
  2. $queue_url = $sqs->create('test_queue');
  3. $sqs->send($queue_url, 'this is a test message');

• receive($queue_url) retrieves messages from the queue.

  Example #6 Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs Message Receive Example

  1. $sqs = new Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs($my_aws_key, $my_aws_secret_key);
  2. $queue_url = $sqs->create('test_queue');
  3. $sqs->send($queue_url, 'this is a test message');
  4. foreach ($sqs->receive($queue_url) as $message) {
  5.     echo "got message ".$message['body'].'<br/>';
  6. }

• deleteMessage($queue_url, $handle) deletes a message from a queue. A message must first be received using the receive() method before it can be deleted.

  Example #7 Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs Message Delete Example

  1. $sqs = new Zend_Service_Amazon_Sqs($my_aws_key, $my_aws_secret_key);
  2. $queue_url = $sqs->create('test_queue');
  3. $sqs->send($queue_url, 'this is a test message');
  4. foreach ($sqs->receive($queue_url) as $message) {
  5.     echo "got message ".$message['body'].'<br/>';
  6.  
  7.     if ($sqs->deleteMessage($queue_url, $message['handle'])) {
  8.         echo "Message deleted";
  9.     }
  10.     else {
  11.         echo "Message not deleted";
  12.     }
  13. }