RPC client class?

[Dick Watson]

We have a legacy device that exposes an RPC server. We have an RPCL
defininition of its interface. We want to develop an RPC client of this
interface in Python that will be usable in both Win32 and open systems
environments.

I can find some *very* dated references to a demo/rpc.py, but I can't find
such a file on my Win Python install. There is an rpc.py in idle, but it
doesn't seem to be a general purpose implementation. (I can find **lots** of
references to xmlrpc.py, but the server predates all of this neato XML
stuff. I also found the "Stackless" rpc.py; it wants to modify base Python.
I'd rather not diverge from the stock Python.)

Is there a Python module suitable for RPC client creation? Where? Why is
this not a standard class? Are we nuts to pursue this course?

 

[Fredrik Lundh]

We have a legacy device that exposes an RPC server. We have an RPCL
defininition of its interface. We want to develop an RPC client of this
interface in Python that will be usable in both Win32 and open systems
environments.

I can find some *very* dated references to a demo/rpc.py

if the RPC you're talking about is Sun RPC, the whole concept is pretty
dated (the original RFCs are from the late eighties).

but I can't find such a file on my Win Python install.

it's in the source distribution, which is browsable via svn.python.org:

http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Demo/rpc

if you have a subversion client, you can get a local copy with

svn co http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Demo/rpc

otherwise, you can grab the entire source archive from:

http://python.org/download/

hope this helps!

</F>

 

[Dick Watson]

if the RPC you're talking about is Sun RPC, the whole concept is pretty
dated (the original RFCs are from the late eighties).

Just because it's dated doesn't meant it isn't still something that
occasionally needs done. Thanks for the advice!

 

[Aaron Lav]

Just because it's dated doesn't meant it isn't still something that
occasionally needs done. Thanks for the advice!

There's also several packages that I know of that include an ONC RPC
IDL compiler, which you might want to look at if the IDL is complex:
- my Pinefs package (http://www.panix.com/~asl2/software/Pinefs/),
- the Michigan CITI pynfs/newpynfs
(http://www.citi.umich.edu/projects/nfsv4/pynfs/)
- Wim Lewis's rpcgen.py
(http://people.omnigroup.com/wiml/soft/stale-index.html#python)

Aaron Lav (http://www.pobox.com/~asl2)

 

[Fredrik Lundh]

Just because it's dated doesn't meant it isn't still something that
occasionally needs done. Thanks for the advice!

oh, absolutely. I just meant to say that just because the references you
found were dated, the code they referred to wasn't in any way obsolete.

(it's all too common these days to treat something that hasn't had at least
four releases in the last five weeks, and a version number looking something
like 0.3.288.5, as abandoned...)

</F>

 

[Richard Tew]

From Dick Watson:

We have a legacy device that exposes an RPC server. We have an RPCL
defininition of its interface. We want to develop an RPC client of this
interface in Python that will be usable in both Win32 and open systems
environments.

I can find some *very* dated references to a demo/rpc.py, but I can't find
such a file on my Win Python install. There is an rpc.py in idle, but it
doesn't seem to be a general purpose implementation. (I can find **lots** of
references to xmlrpc.py, but the server predates all of this neato XML
stuff. I also found the "Stackless" rpc.py; it wants to modify base Python.
I'd rather not diverge from the stock Python.)

The "stackless" rpc.py is also not an implementation of Sun RPC. It
just uses Stackless tasklets to enable direct Python function function
calls from server to client and vice versa. Perhaps it was bad naming
on my part, but I assumed remote procedure calls was a general
technique rather than just a Sun RPC protocol.

Richard.