Gestalt

Gestalt is an asyncio based Python package to help build distributed systems.

Gestalt provides a variety of building blocks to assist building long-running network applications that leverage asyncio concurrency primitives.

gestalt:
an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.

This project is in the early stages of development. Expects lots of changes.

Features

The main features of Gestalt are:

• Inter-process Communications

  • Automatic serialization and compression of message payloads.

  • Socket endpoints.

    • TCP

      • Stream
      • Netstring
      • Message Type Identifier

    • UDP

      • Datagram
      • Message Type Identifier

  • Message queuing (i.e. AMQP) components. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) is an open standard protocol specification for message passing, queuing, routing, reliability and security. One of the most popular implementations of AMQP is RabbitMQ. The Gestalt package provides high level components that support automatic message serialization and compression of message payloads.

    • Topic Publisher and Subscriber
    • Request and Reply (RPC)

• A Timer component that simplifies creating periodic calls to a function. Timers can be created as single-shot, repeat a specified number of times or repeat forever.

• An application runner that simplifies running an asyncio application by performing common setup such as creating an event loop, registering signal handlers, registering a global exception handler and performing graceful shutdown.

Installation

Gestalt is available on PyPI and can be installed using pip.

Install core functionality using the command:

$ pip install gestalt

Gestalt uses optional third party Python packages to obtain support for features such as serialization, compression and message queuing. To install optional extras simply specify one or more of them using the extras specifier notation as shown in the example below which installs all of the available extras:

$ pip install gestalt[amq,protobuf,msgpack,avro,brotli,snappy,yaml]

where the available extras are:

• amq will install the AMQP extras (asyncio bindings for RabbitMQ)
• protobuf will install support for serializing Google Protocol Buffers structures.
• msgpack will install support for serializing Msgpack structures.
• yaml will install support for serializing YAML structures.
• avro will install support for serializing Apache Avro structures.
• brotli will install Brotli compression support.
• snappy will install Snappy compression support. The Python snappy package is simply a binding to a system library. Therefore you must install that first before the Python binding will install successfully. For example, on Debian systems you will want sudo apt-get install libsnappy-dev

Once installed you can begin using Gestalt to develop applications.

Usage

There are many examples under the examples directory.

The docs provides user and developer guides as well as API-level documentation.

Performance Tip

Consider using the high performance uvloop event loop implementation instead of the default asyncio event loop.

Install the package using:

(venv) $ pip install uvloop

Then, simply call uvloop.install() before creating an asyncio event loop either via the standard asyncio.get_event_loop(), asyncio.run() or the gestalt.runner.run function.