pulsar: A Python repository from jklgithub

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Event driven concurrent framework for python. With pulsar you can write asynchronous servers performing one or several activities in different threads and/or processes.

Master CI:
Dev CI:
Documentation:	http://pythonhosted.org/pulsar/
Downloads:	http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pulsar
Source:	https://github.com/quantmind/pulsar
Mailing list:	google user group
Design by:	Quantmind and Luca Sbardella
Platforms:	Linux, OSX, Windows. Python 3.4 and above
Keywords:	client, server, asynchronous, concurrency, actor, thread, process, socket, task queue, wsgi, websocket, redis, json-rpc

An example of a web server written with pulsar which responds with "Hello World!" for every request:

from pulsar.apps import wsgi

def hello(environ, start_response):
    data = b'Hello World!\n'
    response_headers = [
        ('Content-type','text/plain'),
        ('Content-Length', str(len(data)))
    ]
    start_response('200 OK', response_headers)
    return [data]


if __name__ == '__main__':
    wsgi.WSGIServer(callable=hello).start()

Pulsar's goal is to provide an easy way to build scalable network programs. In the Hello world! web server example above, many client connections can be handled concurrently. Pulsar tells the operating system (through epoll or select) that it should be notified when a new connection is made, and then it goes to sleep.

Pulsar uses the multiprocessing module from the standard python library and it can be configured to run in multi-processing mode, multi-threading mode or a combination of the two.

Installing

Pulsar has no hard dependencies, install via pi:

pip install pulsar

or downloading the tarball from pypi.

If cython is available, c extensions will be compiled and installed.

Applications

Pulsar design allows for a host of different asynchronous applications to be implemented in an elegant and efficient way. Out of the box it is shipped with the the following:

Socket servers
WSGI server
JSON-RPC
Web Sockets
Test suite
Data stores
django integration

Examples

Check out the examples directory for various working applications. It includes:

Hello world! wsgi example
An Httpbin wsgi application
An HTTP Proxy server
A JSON-RPC Calculator server
Websocket random graph.
Websocket chat room.
django web site with a websocket based chat room.
The dining philosophers problem.
Asynchronous shell.

Design

Pulsar internals are based on actors primitive. Actors are the atoms of pulsar's concurrent computation, they do not share state between them, communication is achieved via asynchronous inter-process message passing, implemented using the standard python socket library.

Two special classes of actors are the Arbiter, used as a singleton, and the Monitor, a manager of several actors performing similar functions. The Arbiter runs the main eventloop and it controls the life of all actors. Monitors manage group of actors performing similar functions, You can think of them as a pool of actors.

More information about design and philosophy in the documentation.

Add-ons

Pulsar checks if some additional libraries are available at runtime, and uses them to add additional functionalities or improve performance:

setproctitle: if installed, pulsar can use it to change the processes names of the running application.
psutil: if installed, a system key is available in the dictionary returned by Actor info method.
ujson: if installed it is used instead of the native json module.
django: required by the pulsar.apps.pulse application.
unidecode: to enhance the slugify function

Running Tests

Pulsar test suite uses the pulsar test application. To run tests:

python runtests.py

For options and help type:

python runtests.py -h

pep8 check (requires pep8 package):

pep8

Contributing

Development of pulsar happens at Github. We very much welcome your contribution of course. To do so, simply follow these guidelines:

Fork pulsar on github
Create a topic branch git checkout -b my_branch
Push to your branch git push origin my_branch
Create an issue at https://github.com/quantmind/pulsar/issues with pull request for the dev branch.

A good pull request should:

Cover one bug fix or new feature only
Include tests to cover the new code (inside the tests directory)
Preferably have one commit only (you can use rebase to combine several commits into one)
Make sure pep8 tests pass

License

This software is licensed under the BSD 3-clause License. See the LICENSE file in the top distribution directory for the full license text.

jklgithub/pulsar