monocle
An async programming framework with a blocking look-alike syntax.
‼️ Monocle only supports Python v2 which has reached end of life (EOL) on January 1st, 2020. We don't recommend to use this package anymore.‼️
Monocle straightens out event-driven code using Python's generators. It aims to be portable between event-driven I/O frameworks, and currently supports Twisted and Tornado.
It's for Python 2.7 only; the syntax it uses isn't supported in older versions of Python. Monocle has not yet been updated for Python 3.
A Simple Example
Here's a simple monocle program that runs two concurrent lightweight processes (called "o-routines") using Tornado's event loop. One is an HTTP server, and the other makes an HTTP request:
import monocle
monocle.init("tornado")
from monocle import Return
from monocle.stack import eventloop
from monocle.stack.network import add_service
from monocle.stack.network.http import HttpClient, HttpHeaders, HttpServer
@monocle.o
def hello_http(req):
content = "Hello, World!"
headers = HttpHeaders()
headers['Content-Length'] = len(content)
headers['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain'
yield Return(200, headers, content)
@monocle.o
def request():
resp = yield HttpClient.query('http://127.0.0.1:8088/')
print resp.code, resp.body
add_service(HttpServer(8088, hello_http))
monocle.launch(request)
eventloop.run()
@_o
It's important that code be dapper and well-dressed, so if you prefer,
you can don the monocle and use this handy shortcut for @monocle.o
:
from monocle import _o
@_o
def request():
client = HttpClient()
resp = yield client.request('http://127.0.0.1:8088/')
print resp.code, resp.body
It's true, this violates Python's convention that underscores indicate variables for internal use. But rules are for breaking. Live a little.
The Big Idea
Event-driven code can be efficient and easy to reason about, but it often splits up procedures in an unpleasant way. Here's an example of a blocking function to read a request from a user, query a database, and return a result:
def do_cmd(conn):
cmd = conn.read_until("\n")
if cmd.type == "get-address":
user = db.query(cmd.username)
conn.write(user.address)
else:
conn.write("unknown command")
Here's the same thing in event-driven style, using callbacks:
def get_cmd(conn):
conn.read_until("\n", callback=handle_cmd)
def handle_cmd(conn, cmd):
if cmd.type == "get-address":
# keep track of the conn so we can write the response back!
def callback(result):
handle_user_query_result(conn, result)
db.query(cmd.username, callback)
else:
conn.write("unknown command")
def handle_user_query_result(conn, user):
conn.write(user.address)
What started out as a single function in the blocking code has
expanded here into four functions (counting the callback
closure
that captures conn
in handle_cmd
). In real event-driven code,
this kind of thing happens a lot. Any time we want to do I/O, we
have to register a new handler and return back out to the event loop
to let other things happen while we wait for the I/O to finish. It
would be nice if we had some way to tell the event loop to call back
into the middle of our function, so we could just continue where we
left off.
Fortunately, Python has a mechanism that lets us do exactly that, called generators. Monocle uses generators to straighten out event-driven code.
Here's the monocle equivalent of the event-based code above:
@_o
def do_cmd(conn):
cmd = yield conn.read_until("\n")
if cmd.type == "get-address":
user = yield db.query(cmd.username)
yield conn.write(user.address)
else:
yield conn.write("unknown command")
It's event-driven for efficient concurrency, but otherwise looks a lot
like the original blocking code. Each time you see the word yield
in the code above, the o-routine is returning back up to the event
loop and waiting to be called back when the I/O it requested
completes.
This approach is a kind of cooperative concurrency that makes for simpler code than callback-based event-driven code, but which we think is easier to reason about than multi-threaded code.
yield
A word about the word In ordinary Python generators, the norm is to think of yield
as in
crops: the generator yields a value. In monocle o-routines, it's
helpful to think of yield
as in traffic. yield conn.read(10)
in
an o-routine means "yield to other o-routines until we finish reading
10 bytes".
Developer information
To run individual tests on your computer install py.test and the packages for the backend you’d like to test. Here’s how to do it in a separate virtualenv with Twisted:
$ cd monocle/
$ virtualenv --clear --no-site-package .venv
$ .venv/bin/pip install pytest twisted
...
You run the tests like this:
$ .venv/bin/python o_test.py twisted tests/
Alternatively you can use tox to run all the tests for the different backends:
$ .venv/bin/pip install tox
...
$ tox
Check tox.ini to see how the tests are run.
Who?
Monocle was created by Greg Hazel and Steven Hazel.
Related Work
monocle is similar to, and takes inspiration from:
- Twisted's inlineCallbacks
- BitTorrent's yielddefer (used in the 5.x mainline client)
- diesel
- Go's goroutines (and CSP generally)
- Haskell's I/O monad
- eventlet