[Web-SIG] [python-tulip] Re: [Python-Dev] wsgi validator with asynchronous handlers/servers

[Guido van Rossum]

Hi Luca,

Unfortunately I haven't thought yet about the interactions between WSGI and
Tulip or PEP 3156. While I am pretty familiar with WSGI, I have never used
its async features, so I can't be much of a help. My best guess is that we
won't make any changes to WSGI to support PEP 3156 in Python 3.4, but that
once that is out, some folks will come up with an improved design for WSGI
that supports interoperability with standard async event loops. OTOH, maybe
you can read up on the PEP and check out the Tulip implementation (
http://code.google.com/p/tulip/) and maybe you can come up with a suitable
design for integrating PEP 3156 into WSGI? Though it may have to be named
WSGI 2.0 to emphasize that it is backwards incompatible.

--Guido



On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Luca Sbardella <luca.sbardella at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello,
>
> first time here, I'm Luca and I write lots of python of the asynchronous
> variety.
> This question is about wsgi and the way pulsar
> http://quantmind.github.com/pulsar/ handles asynchronous wsgi responses.
>
> Yesterday I sent a message to the python-dev mailing list regarding
> wsgiref.validator, this is the original message
>
> I have an asynchronous wsgi application handler which yields empty bytes
> before it is ready to yield the response body and, importantly, to call
> start_response.
>
> Something like this:
>
> def wsgi_handler(environ, start_response):
>         body = generate_body(environ)
>         body = maybe_async(body)
>         while is_async(body):
>             yield b''
>         start_response(...)
>         ...
>
> I started using wsgiref.validator recently, nice little gem in the
> standard lib, and I discovered that the above handler does not validate!
> Disaster.
> Reading pep 3333
>
> "the application *must* invoke the start_response() callable before the
> iterable yields its first body bytestring, so that the server can send the
> headers before any body content. However, this invocation *may* be
> performed by the iterable's first iteration, so servers *must not* assume
> that start_response() has been called before they begin iterating over
> the iterable."
>
> The pseudocode above does yields bytes before start_response, but they are
> not *body* bytes, they are empty bytes so that the asynchronous wsgi server
> releases the eventloop and call back at the next eventloop iteration.
>
>
> And the response was
>
>
> >PJ Eby wrote:
>> >> The validator is correct for the spec.  You *must* call
>> >> start_response() before yielding any strings at all.
>> >
>> >
>> > Thanks for response PJ,
>> > that is what I, unfortunately, didn't want to hear, the validator being
>> > correct for the "spec" means I can't use it for my asynchronous stuff,
>> which
>> > is a shame :-(((
>> > But why commit to send headers when you may not know about your
>> response?
>> > Sorry if this is the wrong mailing list for the issue, I'll adjust as I
>> go
>> > along.
>>
>> Because async was added as an afterthought to WSGI about nine years
>> ago, and we didn't get it right, but it long ago was too late to do
>> anything about it.  A properly async WSGI implementation will probably
>> have to wait for Tulip (Guido's project to bring a standard async
>> programming API to Python).
>>
>
> and so here I am.
> I know tulip is on its early stages but is there anything on the pipeline
> about wsgi?
> Happy to help if needed.
>
> Regards
> Luca
>
>


-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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