[IPython-dev] remote interactive shell using JSON RPC

[Fernando Perez]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 3:06 PM, Ondrej Certik <ondrej at certik.cz> wrote:
> At the moment, since we were all too busy, our only specification is
> the implementation -- but we use JSON RPC, so the specification of
> that is online (http://json-rpc.org/) and we just need to specify the
> methods + parameters, and those are currently in our sourcecodes.
>
> Well, since I wrote my email above, I also wrote another
> implementation of the API, that runs on the google app engine:
>
> http://engine.sympy.org/
>
> and there you can see, that I am using the exact same script
> (ifemhub), only this time it communicates with a different server...

Cool!

One reason we tried to avoid the direct RPC route was to establish a
strong decoupling between frontends and implementation.  Our messaging
spec is 100% of the api between clients and kernels.  There's a direct
way to get raw kernel attributes for special cases, but by not making
it the  top-level mechanism, we enforce a fairly strong separation
between the two.  We think in the long run that's a good thing.

But there are certainly advantages to the direct rpc approach when
doing rapid development, that's for sure.

Cheers,

f