Receive push data in R Shiny application

Question

I have a simple python program, which should push its data into an R Shiny application. These lines in Shiny parse the "GET" input:

  # Parse the GET query string
  output$queryText <- renderText({
    query <- parseQueryString(session$clientData$url_search)
    eventList[query$eventid] <<- query$event
  })

This works fine with a browser calling "http://127.0.0.1:5923/?eventid=1223&event=somestring". If I try to call the URL in python I get a "Connection reset by peer" in R and nothing is added to the list. My Python code so far:

request = urllib2.Request("http://127.0.0.1:5923/?eventid=1223&event=somestring")
test = urllib2.urlopen(request)

Does anyone know how to get this working or has a better solution to push data from outside into an R Shiny application?

Thanks for help!

Answer 1

My complete solution using websockets with httpuv:

library(httpuv)
startWSServer <- function(){
   if(exists('server')){
      stopDaemonizedServer(server)
   }
   app <- list(
      onWSOpen = function(ws) {
         ws$onMessage(function(binary, message) {
            #handle your message, for example save it somewhere 
            #accessible by Shiny application, here it is just printed
            print(message)
            ws$send("message received")
         })
      }
   )
   server <<- startDaemonizedServer("0.0.0.0", 9454, app)
}

stopWSServer <- function(){
   stopDaemonizedServer(server)
   server <<- NULL
}

Hope this helps ;)