Gearman's Java Message Service Interface provides a platform for job scheduling and messaging. It is designed to help programmers to run distributed and large-scale systems, while allowing them to process parallel and asynchronous tasks with greater efficiency.
Gearman is a generic application framework that allows you to assign work to other machines or processes more suitable to handle the work. This framework facilitates parallel processing, load balancing, and calling of functions between different programming languages. Gearman is versatile and can be applied in various fields, including high-availability web sites, and database replication events. In a nutshell, Gearman acts as the nervous system in the communication of distributed processing.
Some notable features of Gearman include its open-source nature, which means that it is free and has an active community where users can easily contribute or seek help. Gearman supports multiple languages and interface for writing heterogeneous applications. Gearman is flexible, allowing for the use of various design patterns, including Map/Reduce.
Gearman is fast and lightweight, which means that it has optimized servers in C designed to minimize the overhead of applications. It is also embeddable, i.e., easy to introduce into existing applications with minimal overhead. Gearman has no single point of failure and can help scale systems in a fault-tolerant way.
The concept of Gearman came from Danga Interactive (LiveJournal/SixApart), and the name "Gearman" is an anagram for "Manager," which shows that it manages the dispatch of jobs rather than doing anything useful itself.
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