[Pympi-users] Reposted: Web Services and pyMPI:

[Julian C. <rjc...@cs...>]

 (This ended up at the end of the pyMPI 2.4 beta 2 available.... thread, so
I reposted it as a new thread here)
 Web Services and pyMPI:

 Recently (that would be this w/e) I looked at how to set up a web service
in
 python. The major reason was to make code written on python available from
 other platforms, especially Windows and Excel.

 I installed SOAPpy 0.12 (http://pywebsvcs.sourceforge.net/) on both windows
 and Solaris and suffice to say, it"s very easy to use python client to
 python server. SOAPpy handles all the complexity for you. The real
 complexity was having to use WSDL descriptor files to be able to call
python
 servers from Excel (Using MS SoapClient 3.0). Basically on Windows, you
 have? to use a WSDL and you need to use namespaces or it doesn"t work.
 Effectively, you have to pre-define all functions, inputs and outputs in
the
 WSDL file.

 Now to the point:
 You probably aren"t shocked to find out that I was able to get pyMPI to act
 as a soap server. My reasoning was simple: why wait 10 seconds to run
 something on windows, when I can run the same thing in 1 second on pyMPI?
 Below is a simple example of pyMPI running at np 1, generating and
returning
 a short array of random numbers to a soap client. The printout is from the
 client side.

 Issues:
 The major issue that occurs to me regarding pyMPI is that most parallel
 scripts are by nature long running processes. This conflicts with the
nature
 of a server, which is supposed to handle multiple clients and multiple
tasks
 simultaneously. This suggests that the server itself would have to either
 queue requests or manage the slave processes. That seems to add a lot of
 complexity.
 Anyway let me know if you think it has any utility for you.

 regards

 Julian Cook

 >>> # Call a pyMPI soap server
 >>> import SOAPpy
 >>> server = SOAPpy.SOAPProxy("http://brahma:8007/",namespace =
"python-os")
 >>> seed = 69069
 >>> server.config.dumpSOAPIn = 1 # debugging flag
 >>> list = server.ArrayOfFloats(seed)
 *** Incoming SOAP ******************************************************
 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <SOAP-ENV:Envelope
   SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
   xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
   xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema"
 >
 <SOAP-ENV:Body>
 <ArrayOfFloatsResponse SOAP-ENC:root="1">
 <Result SOAP-ENC:arrayType="xsd:double[10]" xsi:type="SOAP-ENC:Array">
 <item>0.70316610192589002</item>
 <item>0.37607240403594255</item>
 <item>0.018328414124517245</item>
 <item>0.87040174120950486</item>
 <item>0.20098065818385713</item>
 <item>0.52939641382095703</item>
 <item>0.68237564433556841</item>
 <item>0.076620094609716638</item>
 <item>0.50193267461011581</item>
 <item>0.53994633368761047</item>
 </Result>
 </ArrayOfFloatsResponse>
 </SOAP-ENV:Body>
 </SOAP-ENV:Envelope>
 ************************************************************************