h2. About amq-client

amq-client is a fully-featured, low-level AMQP 0.9.1 client that runs on Ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.2, REE, Rubinius and JRuby.
It's sweet spot is in serving as foundation for higher-level, more opinionated AMQP libraries.
It can be used directly by applications code when performance and access to
advanced AMQP protocol features is more important that API convenience.

h2(#amqp_gems_family). How does amq-client relate to amqp gem, amq-protocol and libraries like bunny?

<pre>
|--------------|      |-----------------------|      |----------------------|
| amq-protocol |      | amq-client            |      | amqp gem, bunny, etc |
|  - Encoding  | ===> |  - IO abstraction     | ===> |  - high-level API    |
|  - Decoding  |      |  - Low-level AMQP API |      |  - opinionated       |
|              |      |  - Framing            |      |                      |
|--------------|      |-----------------------|      |----------------------|

</pre>

 * At the lowest level, "amq-protocol gem":http://github.com/ruby-amqp/amq-protocol takes care of encoding, decoding and framing.
 * One level above is "amq-client gem":http://github.com/ruby-amqp/amq-client that takes care of network I/O, provides uniform interface for
various I/O libraries like "EventMachine":http://rubyeventmachine.com/, "cool.io":http://coolio.github.com/ or good old TCP sockets and implements
AMQP protocol entities (queues, exchanges, channels and so on) with emphasis on access to every feature available over API convenience or
conciseness.
 * Finally, end applications use libraries like "amqp gem":http://github.com/ruby-amqp/amqp or "bunny AMQP client":http://github.com/ruby-amqp/bunny


h2. Adapters

Currently implemented adapters:

 * "EventMachine":http://github.com/eventmachine/eventmachine
 * "cool.io":http://coolio.github.com/

h3. EventMachine adapter

At this point EventMachine adapter is feature-complete, well-tested, supports 5 Ruby implementations
(1.8.7, 1.9.2, JRuby, Rubinius, Ruby Enterprise Edition) plus Microsoft Windows(tm) and
is used by amqp gem starting with version 0.8.0.


h3. cool.io adapter

cool.io adapter is on par with EventMachine but is not used by any popular libraries (that we know of).
Note that cool.io doesn't work on JRuby and Microsoft Windows(tm).


h2. Installation

amq-client is available from rubygems.org:
<pre>gem install amq-client</pre>

If you use Bundler and want to use the very latest version, add this to your Gemfile:
<pre>
<code>
gem "amq-client", :git => "https://github.com/ruby-amqp/amq-client.git"
</code>
</pre>


h2. Pre-prelease versions

Pre-release versions are available from rubygems.org:

<pre>
gem install amq-client --pre
</pre>


h2. See also

* "API documentation":http://rdoc.info/github/ruby-amqp/amq-client/master/frames
* "Examples":https://github.com/ruby-amqp/amq-client/tree/master/examples/
* Stop by #rabbitmq on irc.freenode.net. You can use "Web IRC client":http://webchat.freenode.net?channels=rabbitmq if you don't have IRC client installed.
* "Ruby AMQP mailing list":http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-amqp
* "Issue tracker":http://github.com/ruby-amqp/amq-client/issues
* "Continous integration server":http://travis-ci.org/#!/ruby-amqp/amq-client
