1) This queue interface recipe implements the queue recipe mentioned in ../../../docs/recipes.[html,pdf]. A more detailed explanation is at http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/05/28/building-a-distributed-concurrent-queue-with-apache-zookeeper/ 2) This recipe does not handle KeeperException.ConnectionLossException or ZCONNECTIONLOSS. It will only work correctly once ZOOKEEPER-22 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ZOOKEEPER-22 is resolved. 3) To compile the queue java recipe you can just run ant jar from this directory. Please report any bugs on the jira http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ZOOKEEPER