[Web-SIG] ANN: WSGIRemote

[Ian Bicking]

Hi all.  I spent some time today with WSGIRemote, and while I don't have 
a real release I've got some docs and a stabler-than-before API, and 
it's registered so you can do "easy_install WSGIRemote==dev".  I'm 
interested in feedback.

The web page is at: http://pythonpaste.org/wsgiremote/

Now you ask: what is it?

So, I've been thinking about how to have fine-grained WSGI services that 
do useful little tasks through RESTish APIs.  If you use this technique, 
you'll get lots of little pieces and it's a pain to deploy, and while 
it's "scalable" in that you can move the pieces in between machines and 
processes, it doesn't scale down all that well since there's lots of 
HTTP requests and serialization/deserialization going on.

Paste already has something of a solution for this with paste.recursive 
(http://pythonpaste.org/module-paste.recursive.html) which lets you do 
subrequests without going over HTTP.  There's still serialization and 
deserialization.  WSGIRemote handles this case by doing the 
serialization lazily, and letting the client see the unserialized data 
so that it can avoid serialization/parsing entirely.

Anyway, that's the basic idea.  The API should also be useful for plain 
ol' over-HTTP calls.

I'm very interested in feedback, including just how the client API looks 
in general disregarding the WSGI integration.  There's probably some 
higher level resourcy stuff that could be done, for instance.


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org