PyAMF backend choices!

Question

I've been using PyAMF to write a backend for a flex app that will request different groups of hundreds of different images depending on what the client needs. I have been using the "simple_server" WSGI server that PyAMF supplies while developing the flex code. Now I'm ready to write a robust backend that will be able to pull images from a mySQL database and send them as fast as possible and as efficiently as possible to many concurrent clients.

The PyAMF documentation is great because they supply many examples to follow, however I am confused about what kind of backend I am trying to create.

Do I want a SocketServer or a WSGI server or something like Twisted or web2py or Tornado? Are these even all different? :) Should I be using Apache modules instead (mod_wsgi or modjy or mod_python)?

I realize that this probably touches on many open debates, so maybe you could just point me to any good summaries of these debates?

Its great to have so many options, but how do I choose?

Answer 1

The short answer is, of course, that it depends on the requirements of your project. How many concurrent connections is "a lot"? How much programmer time can you throw at the problem? How much hardware can you throw at the problem? ...etc...

If you plan to have lots of concurrent clients, it's hard to beat Twisted in the Python world. However, you'll have to deal with your database asynchronously to avoid blocking, and depending on how complex your database interactions are, this can be a bit of a pain. You're basically limited to either using twisted.enterprise.adbapi or coming up with your own twisted-ORM integration.

If you'd rather have "easy" database code (i.e. you want to use an ORM), you're better off going with a (TurboGears/Pylons/plain wsgi) project, probably hosted using Apache and mod_wsgi. This can be a pretty scalable solution, and you get a lot of stuff for free using these frameworks, but it may be more than you need.

I would avoid using one of the many plain python wsgi servers out there (wsgiref, paster, etc.) in production if you really want high performance.

Good Luck!