Python module one line socket comm.

Sat 04 March 2023 Python python / cross-platform / socket / communications / one line

Overview

• installation: see https://arrizza.com/setup-common

Summary

This module contains a simple base class for handling sockets

The communication protocol has these basic rules:

• socket based using TCPIP; only one server per port
• only one client connected at any time. When that client disconnects, another client is allowed to connect.
• a "packet" is terminated by a line feed (0x0A).
• a client sends a packet (aka "command") to the server.
• Alternatively the server may respond with zero, one or more packets (aka "responses")
• The server cannot initiate a response asynchronously by itself i.e. it must wait for an incoming command to send any packets to the client.
• the following commands are predefined:
  • "ping" : the server will respond with "pong". The client can use this to confirm that the socket and communication channel are alive and responsive
  • "disconnect" : the server will initiate a disconnect from the current client
  • "shutdown" : the server will disconnect and then shutdown
  • "invalid" - the server has caught an exception when converting the incoming packet to ASCII (e.g. decode ('utf-8'))

More details

• The server reads the incoming characters from the client one character at a time.
• Once it sees the 0x0A character, it sets up a string buffer of all ASCII characters seen so far (less the 0x0A) and calls a callback function with that string.
• The user must define that callback function.
• The following is up to the user to define:
  • Which incoming commands are legal
  • What response to send if an illegal command is received
  • What response or responses should be sent for all legal commands
  • Determine whether an empty string is a legal command
  • How to handle the scenario when a linefeed needs to be part of a command
  • How to handle non-ASCII scenarios e.g. Unicode or byte strings.

Scripts

• See Quick Start for information on using scripts.
• See xplat-utils submodule for information on the submodule.

Sample code

see the sample directory for a sample client and server. Use doit script to run the sample server.

    ./doit

• starts a server as a background process
• starts a client and sends various commands to the server
• stops that client
• starts another client
• sends some additional commands to the server
• asks the server to shutdown

Other scripts and files

• do_doc: generates doxygen
• do_install: installs python environment
• do_lint: runs static analysis tools
• do_publish: publish the python module
• do_ver: runs verification scripts
• doit: runs a sample client & server
• srs.json: holds a list of requirements the client/server must adhere to
• test_ver.py: run by do_ver to perform verification
• todo.md known issues to fix/address