websockets for python and twisted

RestMQ has a unique endpoint for consumers which uses websockets. As such, I implemented websockets for cyclone and twisted some time ago. Last July there was an upgrade to the protocol to implement a ‘secure’ handshake. This new spec broke most of the implementations because it mixed the upgrade headers part and the first 8 bytes from the content.

I’ve upgraded both cyclone and txwebsockets to understand the ‘old’ spec (hixie 75) and the new one. Basically the handshake involves extracting numbers from two headers (Sec-Websocket-Key1 and Sec-Websocket-Key2), dividing the resulting number by the number of spaces, concatenating them with 8 bytes read from the socket and sending back the md5 digest of this mess back after the new headers. Code to test and calculate the handshake from the headers value can be found here .

Websockets and RESTMQ – power to web applications

Sounds cocky but that’s it. Using RestMQ, which builds on twisted, cyclone and a stack of well proven software, you can provide your applications with a robust and flexible queue over http protocol. It already was possible using COMET and GET/POST/DELETE requests, but now with websockets support it got to a new level.

Release gibberish apart there is a cool small app which streams twitter data to a html/css/js based app. Why all that work, would you say, if I can use it directly (well, not that easy because you need to provide username/pass to twitter streaming service) ? Well, for mashing up data and filtering it before delivery. Also, twitter is a convenient source of streaming data for tests, but usually you would roll up your own data source.

An actor based concurrency model or browser-based map/reduce is trivial, just like retrieving data, programming the proper javascript code to do all the work and post i back to a new queue.

Check the repository at http://github.com/gleicon/restmq_websockets and a live demo at http://cowcat.net/restmq_ws/. Note that it needs a websockets capable browser (chrome or a recent webkit build) and it may be down due to my bandwidth constraints 🙂

RESTMQ – REST/JSON/HTTP based message queue

That’s not a replay from the last post. I’ve pushed into my github repo an initial, cleaned up version of RestMQ. This is special because it not only uses python and twisted, but cyclone, the twisted-based implementation of Tornado. Repo URL:  http://github.com/gleicon/restmq

REST based message queue

I’ve been playing with lots of message queues lately, and with each of one, a protocol is favoured. There are modules for all protocols for a given MQ if you look further, but usually only one of them is more developed than others. That’s ok, because it’s hard to find willing people to help in open source projects.

Based on what I saw and used, a simple queue would suffice for most of cases. I tried Amazon SQS and the idea behind it is nice and simple. As I was looking to build a small “cloud-y” infra structure for my projects, I’ve started to build such queue using Google’s AppEngine. This was almost 1 year ago and just last week I found the original code, which immediatly I saw to clean, add API Keys and make it public.

An office docs to flash converter (i.e. my slideshare clone)

Since a friend of mine told me of using OpenOffice as a daemon to run tasks automatically, I thought that would be nice to try it as a part of a proof of concept to a slideshare mini clone. It would be a matter of uploading the original file, convert it using OO and displaying a page along with it. There`s an API and many clients. I choose not to develop a new client and used JodConverter. Of course I would have to develop a new converter if I wanted to inject or run customized procedures over a document.

Hello there !

Hey, long time no see. What’s up ? Check another mile lenght post about interweb, python, php, queues here: https://zenmachine.wordpress.com/vote-for-pedro-rating-pages-with-activemq-or-any-other-broker/

Enjoy.