Gearman provides a generic application framework to farm out work to other machines or processes that are better suited to do the work. It allows you to do work in parallel, to load balance processing, and to call functions between languages. It can be used in a variety of applications, from high-availability web sites to the transport of database replication events. In other words, it is the nervous system for how distributed processing communicates.

The Stable release is the 1.0 branch. All tarballs in this branch are labeled 1.0.X.

Development is currently targeted to the 1.2 branch. Any tarball labeled as 1.1.X falls into the version. The first stable version of the 1.2 branch will be 1.2.1.

The difference between the 1.0 and 1.2 branches is a higher commitment to ABI compliance. The 1.0 branch left structures exposed that were not a part of the API, but some developers chose to develop against them. The 1.2 branch hides these structures.