microrpc

A micro framework for creating RPC clients and servers in Python.

Warning

This module is intended for prototypes only. It indiscriminately (therefore unsafely) un-pickles any data handed to it. It is not suited for production use at this time. It is possible to disallow some opcodes, but I'm skeptical as to its effectiveness. Perhaps I should consider using JSON.

Usage

First, we need to build our RPC server. To begin we will build a function to multiply two things.

def multiply(a, b):
    return a * b

To enable RPC for this function, we simply create a server and decorate our function. Once decorated, we can start the server and wait for our first call.

from microrpc import Server

server = Server()

@server.rpc
def multiply(a, b):
    return a * b

server.run()

Now we need a client to call our function.

from microrpc import Client

client = Client()
print(client.multiply(2, 10))

Most existing functions can be handled this way. Any exceptions raised server-side will be raised client side if possible. Critical errors will of course do horrible things to your server. Any parameter or return type supported by pickle may be used.

Installing

$ pip install microrpc

Installing From Source

First, we'll need Python 3. There's no reason this couldn't support Python 2.7, but I wanted to get the proof of concept published first.

$ apt-get install python3.3

On Ubuntu there's a known incompatibility with Python 3 and the packaged virtualenv, so get a newer version from pypi.

$ pip install virtualenv
$ virtualenv --version
1.11.4

Get the code and establish a virtualenv.

$ git clone git@github.com:jasonjohnson/microrpc.git
$ cd microrpc
$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.3 env
$ source env/bin/activate
(env) $

Now we can install the package and run the example server and client.

(env) $ python setup.py install
(env) $ python examples/simple_server.py

In another terminal, we can issue calls to the server.

(env) $ python examples/simple_client.py
Undefined remote procedure.
3
7
(env) $