Diesel is a project similar to Tornado. From the Diesel website they describe it as: “Diesel is a framework for writing network applications using asynchronous I/O in Python”. Today we will build a simple Diesel application and communicate with it via Telnet. The potential of Diesel is exciting when you begin to understand how you could use it for Comet based applications.
In order to get Diesel working you currently need Linux and Python 2.6.x. I’m using Ubuntu 9.04 under VMWare Workstation. Once you have Python installed (if its not already) you can easily install Diesel via “easy_install” (Python Cheeseshop) using this command:
sudo easy_install -UZ diesel
Its as simple as that and since Diesel is not dependent on any outside libraries apart from the Python standard library it is a very quick install. If you want the bleeding edge or you simply want to browse the latest documentation, source and example files you can find those here.
Taking some of the sample code on the Diesel website I mashed together a modified version of their echo server that can be shutdown remotely (I basically took the code from their quick start section and the section on the echo server so it should look very similar to their documentation code). Of course you wouldn’t allow remote shutdowns without someone sort of protection on a production server but for development and our testing this is fine.
from diesel import Application, Service, until, until_eol
def handle_echo(remote_addr):
while True:
inp = (yield until_eol())
if inp.strip() == "quit":
app.halt()
break
yield "you said %s" % inp
app = Application()
app.add_service(Service(handle_echo, port=8000))
app.run()
All we do is fire up our application via the command line and listen for connections, if we get one we repeat the data back to the client. If someone sends a “quit” command we shutdown the application server. Firing up Telnet a sample session would look like this:
That’s about as simple as it gets!
