remisc 0.0.1

REST-ful microservice framework for scientific computing

REST-ful microservice framework for scientific computing. Users define a class derived from remisc.service.Service, for which microservice operations are defined by methods decorated by @remisc.service.isop. Operations utilize user-defined models for data exchange, supported by I/O parsing behaviors defined in the remisc.dxm module.

Services

A new microservice is defined by subclassing remisc.service.Service. Methods of this class can be decorated by @remisc.service.isop. These operations take two inputs, the urlparse object of the request and a dictionary of any arguments parsed from the URL’s query string segment. They should return a textual response. A request will be mapped to an operation method by matching the method name to the top-level directory in the request URL (i.e., if a service is hosted on http://mysvcs.com/, the request to http://mysvcs.com/test will look for the method ‘test’ of the host Service-derived class.

The base Service class includes an app() method that defines a WSGI-compliant application interface used to parse request arguments, map them to the appropriate method, and wrap the response generation process to return content.

Models

Frequently, users must provide–or expect to receive–data formatted in accordance with specific models. Such data exchange formats can be defined by any class co-located with a Service-derived class, so long as they are decorated by @remisc.dxm.isdxm.

Operations

Several default operations are built into the base Service class:

_root

Any request without a top-level directory name will be routed to the _root method. As with any other method, this operation can be overridden by the user.

_null

This built-in operation returns an empty response. This is one way to hide error handling–if you’re really into that sort of thing.

_help

This is one of the most powerful behaviors of the remisc framework. The _help operation returns documentation of all operations and data exchange models for the current Service-derived object. Operations are determined by evaluating all instance methods for the @isdxm decorator. Data exchange models are determined by evaluating all classes co-located in the same module as the Service-derived class for the @isdxm decorator. The response maps a JSON object to the docstrings for each operation and data exchange model, so users can determine what operations the service provides and how it may utilize them.

Serving

By default, the remisc package includs a server module that utilizes the core module wsgiref’s simple_server model to host a Service. All Service-derived classes include a WSGI-compliant app() method invoked by the server host process. For production runs, it is strongly advised to invoke that methods from a production-level WSGI server instead.