I'd like to announce the availability of a Common Lisp library for
accessing Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service). For those who haven't heard
of SQS, it is one of the Amazon web services, it basically provides a
distributed message queue with simple message locking, accessible using
XML messages on top of HTTP. That is a surprisingly useful
synchronization primitive for distributed processing applications, and a
service that is very difficult to find elsewhere.
The library is fairly simple and made possible by the excellent
libraries: drakma, ironclad and s-xml. It has been lightly tested on
SBCL and AllegroCL. It is still a work in progress and its portability
across implementation needs to be improved, but since progress has been
slow recently I've decided to release it anyway as it is now. It works
for me, it might also work for others.
Documentation is at http://jan.rychter.com/software/cl-sqs/cl-sqs.html
and you can download the initial version of the code directly from
http://jan.rychter.com/software/cl-sqs/download/files/cl-sqs-1.0.tar.gz
Hope someone finds it useful.
--J.