nemec / automaton Goto Github PK

While Pyro and Thrift are both great, why reinvent the wheel? Unfortunately, Pyro only works with Python so we can't take advantage of Thrift's wide support of programming languages. Thrift is currently a huge pain to install on Windows, and I'd like this to be as painless an install as possible for accessibility purposes, so Thrift is unfortunately set aside for the moment.

Having a custom protocol would allow us to implement only what we need to transmit across the internet, which would make creating clients in other languages much easier.

Requirements:

• Exception support - could just manually do "if exception_id == 1: raise SomeException" and manage the mapping ourselves (or some Python introspection magic)
• Return strings
• Return lists (getAvailableScripts returns a list)
• Parameters (this could be a difficult one, unless we want to limit to str and None types)

It would be useful to have a second access point for "clients" to connect to if they're on the same machine (have it bind to 127.0.0.1/localhost or something). It would give more of an internal api access to the clients. Would also allow the GUI to be refactored out of the main server file and have it connect/disconnect whenever.

It would be nice to have a web interface to the Automaton server. Since Thrift isn't easy to work with, this may require django using Pyro.