What is the current choice for doing RPC in Python?

136
votes

Actually, I've done some work with Pyro and RPyC, but there is more RPC implementation than these two. Can we make a list of them?

Native Python-based protocols:

RPC frameworks with a lot of underlying protocols:

JSON-RPC based frameworks:

SOAP:

XML-RPC based frameworks:

Others:

8
pythonrpc
It really depends on the context. Internet? LAN? Website? Distributed computation? Quick prototype? Bandwidth? Size of messages? - ddaa
@silentghost : done. I prefer not to set "community wiki" by default, because sometimes, I am wrong :) @ddaa : Any. I am asking about RPC in general terms, if they have some pros/cons in specific contexts, please add them to the list. - edomaur
I had the need to do "real" RPC a little while ago (The RFC 1050 kind) and the choices then didn't impress much, so I ended up having to do most of it myself. If anyone has a good alternative to that, I'd like to hear about it. - Mattias Nilsson
For those wanting Python-to-Python RPC - PyRo 4 latest version doesn't support SSL, but PyRo 3 still does - both are all-Python so they support Python 2, Python 3, PyPy, Jython, and IronPython. RPyc does support SSL, while Circuits doesn't mention this. - RichVel
For simple applications you could consider PyMQ which supports synchronous RPC over redis or posix IPC. - thrau

8 Answers

39
votes

XML-RPC is part of the Python standard library:

17
votes

Apache Thrift is a cross-language RPC option developed at Facebook. Works over sockets, function signatures are defined in text files in a language-independent way.

7
votes

Since I've asked this question, I've started using python-symmetric-jsonrpc. It is quite good, can be used between python and non-python software and follow the JSON-RPC standard. But it lacks some examples.

6
votes

You could try Ladon. It serves up multiple web server protocols at once so you can offer more flexibility at the client side.

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ladon

3
votes

There are some attempts at making SOAP work with python, but I haven't tested it much so I can't say if it is good or not.

SOAPy is one example.

3
votes

We are developing Versile Python (VPy), an implementation for python 2.6+ and 3.x of a new ORB/RPC framework. Functional AGPL dev releases for review and testing are available. VPy has native python capabilities similar to PyRo and RPyC via a general native objects layer (code example). The product is designed for platform-independent remote object interaction for implementations of Versile Platform.

Full disclosure: I work for the company developing VPy.

2
votes

maybe ZSI which implements SOAP. I used the stub generator and It worked properly. The only problem I encountered is about doing SOAP throught HTTPS.

1
votes

You missed out omniORB. This is a pretty full CORBA implementation, so you can also use it to talk to other languages that have CORBA support.