XML-RPC + SimpleHTTPServer question

[Tal Einat]

I have recently implemented a system where clients connect to an RPC
server (RPyC in my case), run a webserver on the RPC server, and close
the webserver when they're done with it.

To do this I wrote a ServerThread class which wraps a SimpleHTTPServer,
runs as a thread, and can be signalled to stop. The ServerThread class
doesn't use the server_forever() method (which is just "while 1:
self.handle_request()"), instead it has a while loop which checks a
flag which is signalled from outside.

We need to set a timeout for the handle_request() call. The first thing
I tried was to use Python's socket object's new 'set_timeout' method,
but I found it caused mysterious errors to occur on my WindowsXP
machine :(  Instead I call select() on the server's listening socket to
check for incoming requests, and only then call handle_request().
select()'s timeout works :)


# This is the heart of the code - the request handling loop:
while not self.close_flag.isSet():
        # Use select() to check if there is an incoming request
        r,w,e = select.select([self.server.socket], [], [],
self.timeout)
        if r:
            self.server.handle_request()

# The stop method should be called to stop the request handling loop
def stop(self, wait=False):
    self.close_flag.set()
    if wait:
        while self.isAlive(): # isAlive() is inherited from
threading.Thread
            time.sleep(self.timeout/10.0)

(in my case, self.stop_flag is a threading.Event object)


Good luck!

jbrewer wrote:
> I'm currently implementing an XML-RPC service in Python where binary
> data is sent to the server via URLs.  However, some clients that need
> to access the server may not have access to a web server, and I need to
> find a solution.  I came up with the idea of embedding a simple HTTP
> server in the XML-RPC clients so that files can be sent in the
> following way:
>
> 1.  Start an HTTP server on the client using e.g SImpleHTTPServer on a
> user allowed port
> 2.  Call XML-RPC server with the URL to the file on the client to
> upload
> 3.  Get XML-RPC server response, then shut down HTTP server on client
>
> Does this sound reasonable?  I know that XML-RPC can send binary data,
> but I presume that the URL method would be faster because the XML
> parser could skip reading the binary file (is it base64 encoded as a
> string like in SOAP?).
>
> Anyway, I'm unsure of how to implement this in Python.  In particular,
> how do I shut down a web server once I've started it with
> server_forever()?  Should I run the server in a separate thread or run
> it asynchronously?  Since I'm only uploading one file I don't really
> need to handle multiple clients; I just need to be able to shut the
> server down once remote call has finished.
>
> Any help would be appreciated since I'm new to network programming.
> 
> Jeremy