Question

All I want to do is make some RPC calls over sockets. I have a server that does backendish stuff running jython 2.5. I need to make some calls from a frontend server running Django on CPython. I’ve been beating my head against a wall getting any form of IPC going.

The list of things I’ve tried:

• Apache Thrift doesn’t have any actual releases, just snapshots. I’d like to use something stable.
• JSON-RPC is interesting, and it should be able to run over sockets, but in practice most of the implementations only seem to work over HTTP. HTTP overhead is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
• Protocol Buffers is really only a serialization protocol. From what I gather protobuf provides interface generation for RPC, but it’s only the interface. Actually writing all the connection code is up to the user. If I’m going to be stuck using sockets, I’ll just use JSON for serialization. It’s simpler and faster.
• Pyro doesn’t work properly with Jython as a server. Some sort of socket timeout issue. I’ve sent a message to the mailing list.
• pysage Yay for message passing! Only it requires python 2.6 or the processing module (which has compiled extensions). Jython is version 2.5 and doesn’t allow compiled extensions.
• Candygram is an interesting alternative to pysage, but as far as I can tell it’s unmaintained. I haven’t even tried it out with Jython. Any experiences with it?
• Twisted Perspective Broker Twisted doesn’t work on Jython.

I know that it’d be a snap doing this with XML-RPC, which makes me even more cranky. I want to avoid the overhead of HTTP, but at the same time I really don’t want to get down and dirty with sockets to implement my own protocol. I’ll do it wrong if I do.

Any ideas? I’m probably going to cry for about 20 minutes and then just use XML-RPC.

Answer 1

How about using sockets, but with the help of asyncore and asynchat?

Some links:

• An example
• http://docs.python.org/library/asyncore.html
• http://docs.python.org/library/asynchat.html