Installation

The easiest way is to just open your favorite terminal and type

pip install netmem

Alternatively you can clone this repo and install it with

python setup.py install

Requirements

• The amazing aiohttp library

• Python v3.5+

The basis for netmem is asynchronous IO and event loops, so I apologize to Python v2.x users and for that matter, Python v3.4. Although Python v3.4 supports asyncio, I really like the async for and async with constructs introduced in v3.5, and I use them in a number of places. Since Python is already on v3.6 at the time of this writing, I do not feel too terribly bad leaving v3.4 behind.

Usage

Here is the smallest meaningful example I can come up with. Run it on two different computers on the same network.

import tkinter as tk
import netmem

def main():
    print("Run this on two different computers.")
    mem = netmem.NetworkMemory()
    mem.connect_on_new_thread(netmem.UdpConnector(local_addr=("225.0.0.1", 9991)))

    tk1 = tk.Tk()
    lbl = tk.Label(tk1, text="Favorite operating system:")
    lbl.pack()
    txt = tk.Entry(tk1, textvariable=mem.tk_var("fav_os"))
    txt.pack()

    tk1.mainloop()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

You can bind a listener to the NetworkMemory object to be notified when a value changes, such as when an update arrives over the network. The listener works like the following code snippet.

def memory_changed(netmem_dict, key, old_val, new_val)
    print("Update  {}:{}".format(key, new_val))

def main():
    mem = netmem.NetworkMemory()
    mem.add_listener(memory_changed)
    mem["foo"] = "bar"

The output from this would be the following

Update foo:bar

Incidentally the underlying BindableDict class is pretty handy on its own, without even the network synchronizing capabilities.

Data Structure

NetworkMemory subclasses a Python dictionary, so you can access the data within it as you do any dictionary object. Additionally you can bind listeners to NetworkMemory (because in fact it subclasses a bindable dictionary, which is something I borrowed from other code I wrote).