Question

I’m using Django/Postgres and Python for my web site and the background processes. I have hundreds of messages every minute populating my database and I would like to securely allow other customers access their data.

My customers use either linux or windows so I would like some solution that will be platform/database agnostic.

I looked so far at Piston , Twisted , Celery and RabbitMQ. All these have some way to exchange data. But I’m not sure what to use or if there are any better options.

For example I need the customers to be able to access only their data on my database. Another thing I need is to allow the customers to send a short command back to my servers. My servers will execute the command and return re result in real time back to the customer.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You asked how your customers can securely transmit commands to your website and retrieve results in their response (near “real-time”).

… have you considered hooking a reasonable API into your django app? If you’re concerned about security, you can use authentication and serve it over HTTPS.

It’s not as fancy as the messaging and queuing platforms that the kids are using these days but it’ll get the job done.

Things to like about HTTP/HTTPS APIs:

• They can be load balanced (highly available and scalable!)
• They can be cached (mo’ betta performance and the ability to still serve content while rate limiting how often a client can hit the DB)
• Just about every programming language has a mature library that allows HTTP/HTTPS connections. Some have multiple, e.g. Python: urllib,urllib2,httplib