Introduction
=============

PyCOM is simple and easy-to-use distributed component model written in Python.
PyCOM makes different parts of your network application isolated and
independent, while allowing easy and straightforward interaction between them.

With PyCOM you build your application as a number of *services*,
each running in it's own process (or even on it's own computer)
and talking to each other via 0MQ.
You maintain a PyCOM *nameserver* for finding services by their names
(by the way, nameserver itself is a service).

Services provide *interfaces*, i.e. a named way of interacting with service.
They are somewhat similar to interfaces in e.g. Java, but note that
PyCOM does not perform any checks on interfaces. Interface usually has
some amount of *methods*.

Services are identified by path with parts separated by slashes,
e.g. ``/com/foo/group/service``.

Interfaces are identified by name with parts separated by dots,
e.g. ``com.foo.my-interface``.

Highlights:

- Python 2 and Python 3 support out-of-box
- Free software (new BSD license)
- Low level enough to build your own frameworks
- ... and still simple enough be used as is!
- Doesn't teach you how to do your job - just does it's own
- Without black magic and lots of autogenerated code
- Easy and portable protocol

There is ongoing effort to create a C++ client library for PyCOM:
https://bitbucket.org/divius/libpycom

Examples
---------

Service example::

    import pycom

    @pycom.interface("com.foo.example")
    class Query(object):

        @pycom.method("create")
        def method_create(self, request):
            return {"field1" : request.args}

    pycom.main()

Example service configuration::

    {
        "service": "/com/foo/example",
        "nameserver": "tcp://127.0.0.1:2012",
        "address": "tcp://127.0.0.1:2013"
    }

Example client code for this service::

    import pycom

    pycom.configure(nameserver="tcp://127.0.0.1:2012")

    query = pycom.locate("com.foo.example")
    print query.invoke("create", 42)
    # Prints {"field1" : 42}

And here is a simple way of running any service::

    python -m pycom -a tcp://x.x.x.x:yyyy -s /service/name service1.module1 service1.module2

e.g. for nameserver::

    python -m pycom -a tcp://127.0.0.1:2012 -s /org/pycom/nameserver pycom.apps.nameserver

Quick start
------------

To test (logs will be saved in `test.log`)::

    $ python test.py

To build HTML documentation (requires `Sphinx <http://sphinx.pocoo.org>`_)::

    $ python setup.py build_sphinx
    $ <your-browser> build/sphinx/html/index.html

To install::

    $ python setup.py install

or via `pip`::

    $ pip install pycom

Do not forget to read about known issues in the current version:
http://packages.python.org/pycom/status.html#known-issues

Support
--------

PyCOM repository and issue tracker are hosted on BitBucket.

    Latest source code: https://bitbucket.org/divius/pycom/overview

    Report bugs: https://bitbucket.org/divius/pycom/issues

    Read documentation: http://packages.python.org/pycom

Enjoy =)
