Python Library/Framework for writing P2P applications

Question

Is there any library or framework for writing P2P applications in Python ?

I know the initial Bittorrent client was written in Python. I'm looking something like JXTA but for Python.

Answer 1

I don't know if such a thing exists, though I can offer the following alternatives:

• use Jython and JXTA
• use Python C-API or SWIG and JXTA-C

Answer 2

I quote from the Sun JXTA pages which have a December 2002 date,

"Project JXTA has a Java reference implementation available from download.jxta.org, and is currently working to add reference implementations in other common languages, including C, Objective C, Perl, Ruby, and Python. Though the Java implementation is the most complete implementation of the JXTA protocols, the C implementation (available for both Win32 and Linux) is fast approaching the same level of completeness."

Answer 3

Stackless Python might be of interest to you.

Answer 4

Best option I can think, of course, is to use twisted.

Old version of BitTorrent was built with it. The link is to last known version that uses twisted. You can study that as a starting point.

There's also Vertex. It is a library that uses twisted and allows p2p with firewall bypassing.

Answer 5

Twisted is pretty much the answer to anything seriously network-related in Python, but you really have to buy into the Twisted way of doing things. It's not intrinsically a P2P stack, it's an event loop, callback system and networking framework.

Divmod Vertex is not currently being maintained, and was still pretty rough when I tried using it a few years ago.

CSpace might be the closest to what you're looking for: "a platform for secure, decentralized, user-to-user communication over the internet." It abstracts the P2P and NAT traversal out so your app can act normally and not be "a P2P app."

Similarly, there was an old P2P system out of Australia called "The Circle" a few years ago, written entirely in Python, which had secure P2P messaging, chat, file sharing and other features. 0.41c was the last version: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/circle/

Also from my bookmarks:

http://entangled.sourceforge.net/ is Entangled, "a distributed hash table (DHT) based on Kademlia, as well as a peer-to-peer tuple space implementation."

http://khashmir.sourceforge.net/ is a Python distributed hash table, notable because it networks using the Airhook protocol, which is very fault-tolerant (designed for use e.g. over cellular networks).

http://kenosis.sourceforge.net/ is a Python P2P RPC system.