[Web-SIG] WSGI async API

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 03:06 PM 10/15/04 -0400, Peter Hunt wrote:
>Okay. How will the gateway know to go to the next iteration of the
>application? Constantly iterating over a bunch of empty strings while
>waiting for output seems like a waste of cycles to me. Perhaps, for
>async apps, there can be an environ["async.wakeup"]() method which
>will tell the gateway to iterate until the next empty string?

That's close to the first outstanding proposal for an async API, which went 
something like:

    resume = environ["wsgi.pause_iteration"]()

Which would pause subsequent iteration until 'resume()' was called.

By the way, if you're trying to implement async applications under WSGI, 
I'd really like to know more about what you have in mind, what your goals 
are, etc.  One of the problems in formulating a good WSGI API for async 
applications is that it's hard to envision use cases where somebody wants 
to write an async web application, and yet doesn't want to run it in a 
dedicated process.  So anything you could add to enlighten me on this point 
would make it easier for me to finalize an async API.  I've been leaving it 
up to the SIG so far, because I don't have as strong a vision of the use 
cases for async apps as I do for async servers.