ZeroMQ [1] - it's sockets on steroids. I've used it to do distributed load testing using a small javascript program, a script written in python to cache aggreg

ZeroMQ [1] - it's sockets on steroids. I've used it to do distributed load testing using a small javascript program, a script written in python to cache aggregated results for a big database and as a transport for high performance messaging in a c++ framework. Being able to do distributed computing without having to rely on a single framework or setting up lots of additional infrastructure is really useful!