How to write an API for a Python application?

[Paul Boddie]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> You guys work too hard.

I beg to differ. ;-)

> My reaction is this:  Mr. Kshepitzki asks for an IPC choice,
> says that COM looks like a bit too much, and respondents
> start by loading him with even *heavier* technical alternatives, such as CORBA.

Well, my relatively limited experience with COM-related technologies
suggests that it can be "a bit too much" in terms of the administrative
hassle of declaring interfaces, registering components, and so on.
However, if CORBA-related technologies from the late 1990s could manage
to work so well with Python that one didn't even need to manually
generate the various stubs to access remote services, one would hope
that such practices haven't been abandoned in the CORBA systems
available for Python today.

Looking at some of the omniORB tutorials gives the impression that
there's a certain number of magic utterances that need to be included
in any given program (either client or server) in order to get the
underlying mechanisms up and running, but I think that's to be expected
for any kind of distributed system. My point was that in adopting
something like CORBA, you might need to tolerate a certain amount of
boilerplate code but can then expect various tricky aspects of the
communications mechanisms to have been thought through on your behalf,
meaning that callbacks and other things just work. Rolling your own
solution, on the other hand, can end in a long road discovering what
those CORBA people were doing for all those years.

I suppose if CORBA is too heavy, there's always PYRO. I can't comment
on whether PYRO will be able to do what was requested, however.

Paul