About¶

Spyne aims to save the protocol implementers the hassle of implementing their own remote procedure call api and the application programmers the hassle of jumping through hoops just to expose their services using multiple protocols and transports.

From another perspective, Spyne is a framework for building distributed solutions that strictly follow the MVC pattern, where Model = spyne.model, View = spyne.protocol and Controller = user code.

Spyne comes with the implementations of popular transport, protocol and interface document standards along with a well-defined API that lets you build on existing functionality.

Spyne currently supports the WSDL 1.1 interface description standard, along with SOAP 1.1 and the so-called HttpRpc, XmlObject, JsonObject, MessagePackObject and MessagePackRpc protocols which can be transported via Http or ZeroMQ. The transports can be used in both a client or server setting.

The following are the primary sources of information about spyne:

• Spyne’s home page (that also has the latest documentation) is: http://spyne.io/
• The latest documentation for Spyne can be found at: http://spyne.io/docs
• The official source code repository is at: https://github.com/arskom/spyne
• The official spyne discussion forum is at: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/soap
• You can download Spyne releases from github or pypi.

Spyne is a generalized version of a Soap library known as soaplib. The following legacy versions of soaplib are also available in the source repository at github as branches:

• Soaplib-0.8 branch: http://github.com/arskom/spyne/tree/soaplib-0_8
• Soaplib-1.0 branch: http://github.com/arskom/spyne/tree/soaplib-1_0
• Soaplib-2.0 was never released as a stable package, but the branch is still available: http://github.com/arskom/spyne/tree/soaplib-2_0

Requirements¶

Spyne runs on any version of Python from 2.5 through 2.7. We’re also looking for volunteers to test Python 3.x.

While the aim is to have no requirements besides the standard Python library for the Spyne core, the following packages are needed if you want to run any Spyne service at all:

• lxml
• pytz

both of which are available through easy_install.

Additionally the following software packages are needed for various subsystems of Spyne:

• A Wsgi server of your choice is needed to wrap spyne.server.wsgi.WsgiApplication
• SQLAlchemy is needed for spyne.model.table.TableModel.
• pyzmq is needed for spyne.client.zeromq.ZeroMQClient and spyne.server.zeromq.ZeroMQServer.
• Werkzeug is needed for spyne.protocol.http.HttpRpc.
• PyParsing<2.0 is needed for using HttpPatterns with spyne.protocol.http.HttpRpc. PyParsing 2.x is Python 3 only.
• Twisted is needed for spyne.server.twisted.TwistedWebResource and spyne.client.twisted.TwistedHttpClient.
• Django>=1.3> is needed for spyne.server.django.DjangoApplication.
• Pyramid is needed for spyne.server.pyramid.PyramidApplication.
• MessagePack is needed for spyne.protocol.msgpack.
• simplejson is used when found for spyne.protocol.json.

You are advised to add these as requirements to your own projects, as these are only optional dependencies of Spyne, thus not handled in its setup script.

Installing¶

You can get spyne via pypi:

easy_install spyne

or you can clone from github:

git clone git://github.com/arskom/spyne.git

or get the source distribution from one of the download sites and unpack it.

To install from source distribution, you should run its setup script as usual:

python setup.py install

To run the tests use:

cd spyne/tests && ./run_tests.sh

And if you want to make any changes to the Spyne code, just use

python setup.py develop

so that you can painlessly test your patches.

Contributing¶

The main developers of Spyne lurk in the official soap implementors forum kindly operated by python.org. That’s mostly because Spyne is the continuation of soaplib, but also because soap is an important part of Spyne.

If you wish to contribute to Spyne’s development, create a personal fork on GitHub. When you are ready to push to the upstream repository, submit a pull request to bring your work to the attention of the core committers. They will respond to review your patch and act accordingly.

To save both parties time, make sure the existing tests pass. If you are adding new functionality or fixing a bug, please have the accompanying test. This will both help us increase test coverage and insure your use-case is immune to feature code changes. You could also summarize in one or two lines how your work will affect the life of spyne users in the CHANGELOG file.

Please follow the PEP 8 style guidelines for both source code and docstrings.

We could also use help with the docs, which are built from restructured text using Sphinx.

Regular contributors may be invited to join as a core Spyne committer on GitHub. Even if this gives the core committers the power to commit directly to the core repository, we highly value code reviews and expect every significant change to be committed via pull requests.