Python, Twisted, Django, reactor.run() causing problem

Question

I have a Django web application. I also have a spell server written using twisted running on the same machine having django (running on localhost:8090). The idea being when user does some action, request comes to Django which in turn connects to this twisted server & server sends data back to Django. Finally Django puts this data in some html template & serves it back to the user.

Here's where I am having a problem. In my Django app, when the request comes in I create a simple twisted client to connect to the locally run twisted server.

...
        factory = Spell_Factory(query) 
        reactor.connectTCP(AS_SERVER_HOST, AS_SERVER_PORT, factory)
        reactor.run(installSignalHandlers=0)
        print factory.results
...

The reactor.run() is causing a problem. Since it's an event loop. The next time this same code is executed by Django, I am unable to connect to the server. How does one handle this?

Answer 1

The above two answers are correct. However, considering that you've already implemented a spelling server then run it as one. You can start by running it on the same machine as a separate process - at localhost:PORT. Right now it seems you have a very simple binary protocol interface already - you can implement an equally simple Python client using the standard lib's socket interface in blocking mode.

However, I suggest playing around with twisted.web and expose a simple web interface. You can use JSON to serialize and deserialize data - which is well supported by Django. Here's a very quick example:

import json
from twisted.web import server, resource
from twisted.python import log

class Root(resource.Resource):
    def getChild(self, path, request):
        # represents / on your web interface
        return self

class WebInterface(resource.Resource):
    isLeaf = True
    def render_GET(self, request):
        log.msg('GOT a GET request.')
        # read request.args if you need to process query args
        # ... call some internal service and get output ...
        return json.dumps(output)

class SpellingSite(server.Site):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.root = Root()
        server.Site.__init__(self, self.root, **kwargs)
        self.root.putChild('spell', WebInterface())

And to run it you can use the following skeleton .tac file:

from twisted.application import service, internet

site = SpellingSite()
application = service.Application('WebSpell')
# attach the service to its parent application
service_collection = service.IServiceCollection(application)
internet.TCPServer(PORT, site).setServiceParent(service_collection)

Running your service as another first class service allows you to run it on another machine one day if you find the need - exposing a web interface makes it easy to horizontally scale it behind a reverse proxying load balancer too.