tinyrpc: A modular RPC library

tinyrpc is a library for making and handling RPC calls in Python. Its initial scope is handling jsonrpc, although it aims to be very well-documented and modular to make it easy to add support for further protocols.

A feature is support of multiple transports (or none at all) and providing clever syntactic sugar for writing dispatchers.

Quickstart examples

The source contains all of these examples in a working fashion in the examples subfolder.

HTTP based

A client making JSONRPC calls via HTTP (this requires requests to be installed):

from tinyrpc.protocols.jsonrpc import JSONRPCProtocol
from tinyrpc.transports.http import HttpPostClientTransport
from tinyrpc import RPCClient

rpc_client = RPCClient(
    JSONRPCProtocol(),
    HttpPostClientTransport('http://example.org/jsonrpc/2.0/')
)

time_server = rpc_client.get_proxy()

# ...

# call a method called 'get_time_in' with a single string argument
time_in_berlin = time_server.get_time_in('Europe/Berlin')

These can be answered by a server implemented as follows:

import gevent
import gevent.wsgi
import gevent.queue
from tinyrpc.protocols.jsonrpc import JSONRPCProtocol
from tinyrpc.transports.wsgi import WsgiServerTransport
from tinyrpc.server.gevent import RPCServerGreenlets
from tinyrpc.dispatch import RPCDispatcher

dispatcher = RPCDispatcher()
transport = WsgiServerTransport(queue_class=gevent.queue.Queue)

# start wsgi server as a background-greenlet
wsgi_server = gevent.wsgi.WSGIServer(('127.0.0.1', 80), transport.handle)
gevent.spawn(wsgi_server.serve_forever)

rpc_server = RPCServerGreenlets(
    transport,
    JSONRPCProtocol(),
    dispatcher
)

@dispatcher.public
def reverse_string(s):
    return s[::-1]

# in the main greenlet, run our rpc_server
rpc_server.serve_forever()

0mq

An example using zmq is very similiar, differing only in the instantiation of the transport:

import zmq

from tinyrpc.protocols.jsonrpc import JSONRPCProtocol
from tinyrpc.transports.zmq import ZmqClientTransport
from tinyrpc import RPCClient

ctx = zmq.Context()

rpc_client = RPCClient(
    JSONRPCProtocol(),
    ZmqClientTransport.create(ctx, 'tcp://127.0.0.1:5001')
)

remote_server = rpc_client.get_proxy()

# call a method called 'reverse_string' with a single string argument
result = remote_server.reverse_string('Hello, World!')

print "Server answered:", result

Matching server:

import zmq

from tinyrpc.protocols.jsonrpc import JSONRPCProtocol
from tinyrpc.transports.zmq import ZmqServerTransport
from tinyrpc.server import RPCServer
from tinyrpc.dispatch import RPCDispatcher

ctx = zmq.Context()
dispatcher = RPCDispatcher()
transport = ZmqServerTransport.create(ctx, 'tcp://127.0.0.1:5001')

rpc_server = RPCServer(
    transport,
    JSONRPCProtocol(),
    dispatcher
)

@dispatcher.public
def reverse_string(s):
    return s[::-1]

rpc_server.serve_forever()

Further examples

In The protocol layer, you can find client and server examples on how to use just the protocol parsing parts of tinyrpc.

The RPCDispatcher should be useful on its own (or at least easily replaced with one of your choosing), see Dispatching for details.

People

Creator

Maintainer

Contributors