Would it be a good idea or bad idea to connect a VB.NET frontend with a Python backend using sockets?

Question

I have some really nice Python code to do what I need to do. I don't particularly like any of the Python GUI choices though. wxPython is nice, but for what I need, the speed on resizing, refreshing and dynamically adding controls just isn't there. I would like to create the GUI in VB.NET. I imagine I could use IronPython to link the two, but that creates a dependency on a rather large third-party product. I was perusing the MSDN documentation on Windows IPC and got the idea to use sockets. I copied the Python echo server code from the Python documentation and in under 5 minutes was able to create a client in VB.NET without even reading the System.Net.Sockets documentation, so this certainly doesn't seem too hard.

The question I have is... is this a terrible idea? If so, what should I be doing instead?

If this is a good idea, how do I go about it?

Answer 1

It's not a terrible idea. In fact, if you write the Python code to have a RESTful interface, and then access that from VB.NET, it is a downright good idea. Later on you could reuse that Python server from any other application written in Python or VB.NET or something else. Because REST is standard and easy to test, people can even do GETs from a browser and maybe that will be useful in itself.

Here is a Yahoo page that gives you code examples to do REST GET, POST and so on, in VB.NET.

If you think REST has too much overhead and need something more lightweight, please don't try to invent your own protocol. Consider something like Google's Protocol Buffers which can also be used from VB.NET.

Answer 2

I think this is an excellent idea. I'll second Michael Dillon's recommendation for a REST API, and I'll further recommend that you use Django to implement your REST server.

I wrote a REST web service using Django, and Django made it really easy and fun. Django made it really simple to set up the URLs the way I wanted them, to run whatever code a URL called for, and to interact with the database as needed. My web service was rock solid reliable, and I was able to test it for debugging simply using a web browser.

If you already have your code working in Python and just want to slap on a glue interface, and if REST doesn't seem like what you want, you could look at the Twisted networking framework. Here is a nice article on how to do networking in Python with both the standard Python modules and with Twisted.