msoucy.me

RESTZZZ Status Update

Although it’s been a couple of weeks, I have a bit of a status update on the project from before.

First of all, I decided to rename the project from ZHTTP (which, to me, implies HTTP over ZMQ, which is already something with existing implementations) to RESTZZZ. This was done to reflect what the project is actually doing more closely: not strictly HTTP itself, but creating a RESTful API for 0mq transports.

The basic idea behind RESTful APIs is that you use the existing HTTP actions to alter some sort of server-wide state:

• GET is used for retrieving data
• POST is used for creating new resources (mostly)
• PUT is used for updating existing resources (mostly)
• DELETE removes a resource

For RESTZZZ, I decided that only GET and POST were actually relevant - GET will ask the given socket to retrieve the next message, and POST will publish a message on the given socket. Sockets are mapped to connections via a configuration file.

Thanks to my mentor, I was made aware of some existing Python libraries that vastly simplified my code. Cornice is a REST framework for Pyramid that makes the code LOOK like the API itself. It removed the need for me to have to parse out the HTTP headers. As someone who is used to using just the standard library for a language, and as few other libraries as possible, I hadn’t even thought of it.

Currently, RESTZZZ is somewhat functional - it can load from a configuration file, connect each socket to a given endpoint, subscribe properly, and respond to REST calls with appropriate responses. When responding to a GET, it returns a JSON object that contains the data. This isn’t perfect, but since it’s impossible to fully map the two protocols perfectly, this is a fairly close and simple solution.

Things that I still need to do include allowing one socket to support connecting to multiple endpoints, for aggregating data sources easily.