Python Remote Objects

Python Remote Objects 4.x

Pyro is a library that enables you to build applications in which objects can talk to each other over the network, with minimal programming effort. You can just use normal Python method calls, with almost every possible parameter and return value type, and Pyro takes care of locating the right object on the right computer to execute the method. It is designed to be very easy to use, and to generally stay out of your way. But it also provides a set of powerful features that enables you to build distributed applications rapidly and effortlessly. Pyro is written in 100% pure Python and therefore runs on many platforms and Python versions, including Python 3.x.

Pyro is written and © by Irmen de Jong. It is open-source software and is released under the MIT Software License (more info).

Download and Info

• Online documentation. The first place to look for details.
• Release info (change log).
• Download from Pypi. You can install Pyro4 with pip or easy_install, or use the setup.py script from the source archive.
• Anonymous SVN repository access (read-only): svn://svn.razorvine.net/Pyro/Pyro4

More info

The manual has all information you need. Please let me know if you think something is missing.

For fun, here is a screenshot of one of the examples included with Pyro (example is called 'robots'):

It simulates a bunch of robots battling in an arena, and you can start any number of remote clients that add robots to the fight. Each client could program their own robot behavior (a few simple behaviors are implemented in the example).

Ideas / TODO

• IPV6 support (testable in 'ipv6' branch)
• add a FAQ to the docs? first question: name server can still be discovered when running on localhost but then communicationerror to the server?
• HMAC: Allow per-proxy HMAC key (to be able to connect to different servers with different keys)
• Add more topics to the index of the docs
• More decorators? @synchronized, @oneway, @expose (also on attributes?)
• Batched calls for multiple different proxies (for the same daemon)
• Refactor the threadpool so it controls its own idle/busy workers and adds/removes workers as needed
• let async/Future use a client-side threadpool instead of spawning endless new threads
• add multiprocess server (forking?) based on multiprocessing?
• explain callbacks better?
• automatic callback handling if you pass a callable to the server?
• Make Pyro support listening to multiple interfaces (and returning the correct URI from the daemon. Name server is harder...)
• Make it possible to plug in a user written socketserver (register custom Pyro4.config.SERVERTYPE ?)
• Does the socketserver-api need more tweaks so that it will be easy for users to provide their own servers?
• Add to docs: use socketserver API to write socket server based on another event mechanism such as epoll or kqueue, and how to plug it in
• simplify the shutdown/close methods so that they only signal a shutdown condition and let the eventloop thread clean up nicely. This to avoid all kinds of exceptions on shutdown (mainly socketserver on ironpython now)
• on proxy connect: query the server about the object. Can be a method on the DaemonObject itself. Query for meta info about the object: oneway methods, security settings, exposed attributes (to create properties?), whatever.
• object activation / object registration strategies: instance_per_call, instance_per_connection, shared_instance (let the daemon instantiate your object's class instead of user code)
• persistent Name Server (store namespace in a database on disk) use sqlite3 because it needs multithreading/transactions
• daemon (nameserver) should be able to disconnect clients that haven't been active over the past X seconds
• connection validator is missing and I want it back with similar features as Pyro3, but see next item
• clean way to have server hooks for client connects and disconnects
• look at SSL support. The standard ssl module should be enough to do this without the need of 3rd party stuff such as m2crypto or pyopenssl
• Pyro-over-SSH (not SSL) using Paramiko
• Name server cannot be stopped if there are still connections to it