JSON-RPC 2.0 Over ZeroMQ

Written by Dan Brown. See the the LICENSE file for licensing information.

This is a library in Python enabling JSON-RPC 2.0 over ZeroMQ. It includes support for both clients and servers.

This is packaged as a standard Python project, so just install using python setup.py install, or with pip.

Servers

from jsonrpc2_zeromq import RPCServer

class EchoServer(RPCServer):

    def handle_echo_method(self, msg):
        return msg

s = EchoServer("tcp://127.0.0.1:57570")
s.run()

This creates a server listening on a ZeroMQ REP socket – so only methods are allowed, not notifications. See the RPCNotificationServer as well, which will listen on a ROUTER socket and allow notifications.

Each server is a Python Thread, so the call to run() can be replaced by start() to have it running in a background thread.

Clients

from jsonrpc2_zeromq import RPCClient

c = RPCClient("tcp://127.0.0.1:57570")
print c.echo("Echo?")

# Assuming the above compliant server, should print "Echo?"

There are various classes, assuming different JSON-RPC 2.0 and ZeroMQ characteristics. The above, for example, will connect a REQ socket to the given endpoint.

Notifications

Given a server that accepts notifications:

from jsonrpc2_zeromq import RPCNotificationServer

class EventReceiver(RPCNotificationServer):

    def handle_event_method(self, event_type, event_data):
        print "Got event!\nType: {0}\nData: {1}\n".format(event_type, event_data)

s = EventReceiver("tcp://127.0.0.1:60666")
s.run()

You can then send notifications thus:

from jsonrpc2_zeromq import RPCNotifierClient

c = RPCNotifierClient("tcp://127.0.0.1:60666")
c.notify.event('birthday!', 'yours!')

Also included are NotificationOnlyPullServer and NotifierOnlyPushClient which are designed for sending only notifications one-way over PUSH and PULL sockets.

There is also a client, NotificationReceiverClient, that is able to handle notifications returned back to it from a server. This is useful for situations where you "subscribe", via a standard RPC call, to events from the server, and they are returned back to the client as notifications when they occur. There is not currently a corresponding server class for this pattern. Here is a (one-sided) example:

from jsonrpc2_zeromq import NotificationReceiverClient

class EventSubscriber(NotificationReceiverClient):

    def handle_event_notification(self, event_type, event_data):
        print "Got event!\nType: {0}\nData: {1}\n".format(event_type, event_data)

c = EventSubscriber("tcp://127.0.0.1:60666")
c.subscribe()
c.wait_for_notifications()

Logging

The standard Python logging module is used for logging. It doesn't output anything by default. Either retrieve the built-in library logger with logging.getLogger('jsonrpc2_zeromq') or pass your own Logger instance into a client or server's __init__ with the logger keyword argument.

Currently there are some helpful messages outputted at the DEBUG level, server exceptions on ERROR, and a server start message on INFO.

Testing

Tests are included. Install nose and just run nosetests in the project root.