This queue interface recipe implements the queue recipe A more detailed explanation is at: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/05/28/building-a-distributed-concurrent-queue-with-apache-zookeeper/ 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.