1.1   Why RPC? / splitting applications into independent parts

It's often sensible to split applications into several (independent!) parts. This normally leads to a cleaner design, reduces the complexity, improves maintainability and often also enhances security.

You may think that the "downside" of this is that an interface between these parts has to be defined. But in reality, it's an advantage to think about the interface (this normally leads to cleaner design) and to explicitly define it. Remember that you always have an interface between the parts of your application, although they are often implicit. And to cite The Zen of Python: "Explicit is better than implicit."

To really separate the parts from each other, you probably want to run the parts in several processes (with different users/rights). But this means that the processes have to communicate with each other in some way. This is called inter-process communication (IPC), and one way of doing this is by using remote-procedure calls (RPC).

1.2   Why JSON-RPC?

A RPC-system should (in my opinion):

• be simple and lightweight (but powerful)
• be transparent (so for both processes the RPC should look like a normal function call)
• add only small overhead

Additionally it's often good (except for some small embedded or high-speed applications), to:

• use a human-readable/self-contained/ASCII format

When thinking of a very simple, human-readable/ASCII RPC, many think of XML-RPC. But that's not really simple. XML on the one hand is somehow overkill (or: bloat-ware ;)) [1], on the other hand it's not really suited for data serialization because many "special characters" have to be escaped. And the python xmlrpclib even says that the caller is responsible "to ensure that the string is free of characters that aren't allowed in XML", which essentially means that you always have to either use the binary wrapper or use something like base64-over-xmlrpc (!), which is somehow strange.

But there's a much simpler and better format for data-serialization: JSON. It's very clean, supports unicode (!) by default, and integrates extremely easily into e.g. python or javascript.

And JSON-RPC -- which uses JSON for serialization -- is probably the simplest, most lightweight, cleanest "ASCII"-RPC out there. And it has more advantages:

• unicode: JSON and JSON-RPC support unicode out-of-the-box.
• small and simple
• very compact on the line
• transport-independent: JSON-RPC can be used with any transport, e.g. Unix domain sockets, TCP/IP, http, https, avian carriers, ...
• JSON directly supports Null/None
• supports named/keyword parameters
• notifications
• built-in request-response-matching ("id"-field)
• ...

So, it's definitely worth a look!

1.3   Thoughts about RPC-systems

In my opinion, a RPC-system consists of several independent parts:

1. data structure (how requests/responses/errors look like)
2. serializer (i.e. JSON, XML, URI, ...)
3. transport (i.e. Unix Domain Socket, TCP/IP, HTTP)
4. proxy/dispatcher (map function-calls to RPC and vice versa)

Unfortunately, these parts are often not treated as independent, which results in unnecessarily complex results. A RPC-specification should only define point 1 ("data structure") [2], and tell the user which serialization to use [3].

2.1   JSON-RPC 1.0/2.0

"JSON-RPC is a lightweight remote procedure call protocol. It's designed to be simple!" [JSON-RPC 1.0 Specification]

That's good.

But unfortunately, some useful things were missing in JSON-RPC 1.0, especially named parameters and some definitions about error-messages. So, I wrote a new JSON-RPC-specification, which will soon be released as JSON-RPC 2.0.

Please read the specifications, and see how simple they are!

2.2   Differences between 1.0 and 2.0

For all of you, who already know JSON-RPC 1.0, here is a list of the main differences of JSON-RPC 2.0, compared with 1.0:

• client-server instead of peer-to-peer:

  JSON-RPC 2.0 uses a client-server-architecture.

  V1.0 used a peer-to-peer-architecture where every peer was both server and client.
• Transport independence:

  JSON-RPC 2.0 doesn't define any transport-specific issues, since transport and RPC are independent.

  V1.0 defined that exceptions must be raised if the connection is closed, and that invalid requests/responses must close the connection (and raise exceptions).

• Named parameters added (see Example below)

• Reduced fields:

  • Request: params may be omitted
  • Notification: doesn't contain an id anymore
  • Response: contains only result OR error (but not both)

• "jsonrpc" field added: added a version-field to the Request (and also to the Response) to resolve compatibility issues with JSON-RPC 1.0.

• Optional parameters: defined that unspecified optional parameters SHOULD use a default-value.

• Error-definitions added

• System descriptions added (at least defined a placeholder)

• Extensions: moved "class hinting" from the base specification to an (optional) extension.

3.1   Status

My module currently supports:

• JSON-RPC 1.0 "serialization"

  (but without the "peer-to-peer-architecture", the transport-specific definitions of JSON-RPC 1.0 and class-hinting)
• JSON-RPC 2.0 requests, notifications, responses and errors

  (but the proxy currently does not generate notifications)

• logfiles (STDOUT, logfile or logfile with timestamp)

• communication via Unix domain sockets or TCP/IP-sockets (or via STDIN/STDOUT for debugging)

The following features are planned for the future:

• server: multithreading RPC-server
• client: multicall (send several requests)
• transport: SSL sockets, maybe HTTP, HTTPS
• types: support for date/time (ISO 8601)
• errors: maybe customizable error-codes/exceptions
• add system-descriptions

3.2   Example

A JSON-RPC 2.0-Server over TCP/IP (incl. a logfile):

# create a JSON-RPC-server
import jsonrpc
server = jsonrpc.Server(jsonrpc.JsonRpc20(), jsonrpc.TransportTcpIp(addr=("127.0.0.1", 31415), logfunc=jsonrpc.log_file("myrpc.log")))

# define some example-procedures and register them (so they can be called via RPC)
def echo(s):
    return s

def search(number=None, last_name=None, first_name=None):
    sql_where = []
    sql_vars  = []
    if number is not None:
        sql_where.append("number=%s")
        sql_vars.append(number)
    if last_name is not None:
        sql_where.append("last_name=%s")
        sql_vars.append(last_name)
    if first_name is not None:
        sql_where.append("first_name=%s")
        sql_vars.append(first_name)
    sql_query = "SELECT id, last_name, first_name, number FROM mytable"
    if sql_where:
        sql_query += " WHERE" + " AND ".join(sql_where)
    cursor = ...
    cursor.execute(sql_query, *sql_vars)
    return cursor.fetchall()

server.register_function( echo )
server.register_function( search )

# start server
server.serve()

The client then looks like:

# create JSON-RPC client
import jsonrpc
server = jsonrpc.ServerProxy(jsonrpc.JsonRpc20(), jsonrpc.TransportTcpIp(addr=("127.0.0.1", 31415)))

# call a remote-procedure (with positional parameters)
result = server.echo("hello world")

# call a remote-procedure (with named/keyword parameters)
found = server.search(last_name='Python')

The requests and responses, sent between client and server are:

{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "echo", "params": ["hello world"], "id": 0}
{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": "hello world", "id": 0}

{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "search", "params": {"last_name": "Python"}, "id": 0}
{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": [{"first_name": "Brian", "last_name": "Python", "id": 1979, "number": 42}, {"first_name": "Monty", "last_name": "Python", "id": 4, "number": 1}], "id": 0}

And the logfile myrpc.log contains:

listen ('127.0.0.1', 31415)
('127.0.0.1', 36000) connected
('127.0.0.1', 36000) --> '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "echo", "params": ["hello world"], "id": 0}'
('127.0.0.1', 36000) <-- '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": "hello world", "id": 0}'
('127.0.0.1', 36000) close
('127.0.0.1', 48336) connected
('127.0.0.1', 48336) --> '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "search", "params": {"last_name": "Python"}, "id": 0}'
('127.0.0.1', 48336) <-- '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": [{"first_name": "Brian", "last_name": "Python", "id": 1979, "number": 42}, {"first_name": "Monty", "last_name": "Python", "id": 4, "number": 1}], "id": 0}'
('127.0.0.1', 48336) close
close ('127.0.0.1', 31415)

Here, you can directly see the modular architecture, as described in Thoughts about RPC-systems.

You can find more examples (more extensive, more detailed, with error-messages etc.) in the docstring of my code.

3.3   Download

My JSON-RPC-implementation consists of a single python-file, with very extensive documentation (in the docstrings):

jsonrpc.py (42 kB, 495 lines code, 468 lines documentation+comments ;))

Release: 2008-08-31-beta

License: BSD-like (see __license__ in jsonrpc.py).

Requirements: python (tested with 2.4), python-simplejson

Note: This is still beta-code. So don't blame me if anything goes wrong...

3.4   Extending JSON

The json-serializer I use ("simplejson") can be easily extended. So you can e.g. add date/time-formats, or directly serialize the results of a PostgreSQL-query (!). Here is a small example:

class JsonPgsqlEncoder(simplejson.JSONEncoder):
    """JSON-encoder with additional support for some PgSQL-types.

    Additional types supported:

    - PgBoolean (->bool)
    - PgResultSet (->dict)
    - PgArray (->list)
    - mx.DateTime (->str)
    - PgMoney (->float)
    - PgNumeric (-> scaled int)
    - PgBytea, PgOther (->str)

    :SeeAlso: pyPgSQL-documentation, PEP-249 (DB-API 2.0)

    :Note: the date/time here currently is not yet encoded in ISO 8601
           as it should be.
    """
    def default(self, obj):
        if   isinstance(obj, PgSQL.PgBooleanType):
            return bool(obj)
        elif isinstance(obj, PgSQL.PgResultSet):
            return dict(obj)
        elif isinstance(obj, PgSQL.PgArray):
            return list(obj)
        elif isinstance(obj, (DateTime.DateTimeType, DateTime.DateTimeDeltaType, DateTime.RelativeDateTime)):
            return str(obj)
        elif isinstance(obj, PgSQL.PgMoney):
            return float(obj)
        elif isinstance(obj, PgSQL.PgNumeric):
            return long(obj*10**obj.getScale())
        elif isinstance(obj, (PgSQL.PgBytea, PgSQL.PgOther)):
            return str(obj)
        return simplejson.JSONEncoder.default(self, obj)

4.1   XML-RPC

I've already written something about XML-RPC in Why JSON-RPC?.

But, to get an impression, consider the Example above. In XML-RPC the 1st call would look like:

POST /RPC2 HTTP/1.0
Host: 127.0.0.1:12345
User-Agent: ...
Content-Type: text/xml
Content-Length: 159

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>echo</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value><string>hello world</string></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>


HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: ...
Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:06:09 GMT
Content-type: text/xml
Content-length: 137

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<methodResponse>
<params>
<param>
<value><string>hello world</string></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodResponse>

Note that it uses http (instead of simple sockets), since XML-RPC unfortunately always requires http.

Compare this with the json-rpc-equivalent:

{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "echo", "params": ["hello world"], "id": 0}
{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": "hello world", "id": 0}

The 2nd call (search(), with named parameters) is probably not even possible with plain XML-RPC. First, because there are no named parameters in XML-RPC, and second, because XML-RPC doesn't support None or Null. But if you try to approximate it, it could look like:

POST /RPC2 HTTP/1.0
Host: 127.0.0.1:31415
User-Agent: ...
Content-Type: text/xml
Content-Length: 202

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<methodCall>
<methodName>search</methodName>
<params>
<param>
<value><int>-1</int></value>
</param>
<param>
<value><string>Python</string></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodCall>


HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: ...
Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:58:49 GMT
Content-type: text/xml
Content-length: 794

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<methodResponse>
<params>
<param>
<value><array><data>
<value><struct>
<member>
<name>first_name</name>
<value><string>Brian</string></value>
</member>
<member>
<name>last_name</name>
<value><string>Python</string></value>
</member>
<member>
<name>id</name>
<value><int>1979</int></value>
</member>
<member>
<name>number</name>
<value><int>42</int></value>
</member>
</struct></value>
<value><struct>
<member>
<name>first_name</name>
<value><string>Monty</string></value>
</member>
<member>
<name>last_name</name>
<value><string>Python</string></value>
</member>
<member>
<name>id</name>
<value><int>4</int></value>
</member>
<member>
<name>number</name>
<value><int>1</int></value>
</member>
</struct></value>
</data></array></value>
</param>
</params>
</methodResponse>

And again, the JSON-RPC-equivalent:

{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "search", "params": {"last_name": "Python"}, "id": 0}
{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "result": [{"first_name": "Brian", "last_name": "Python", "id": 1979, "number": 42}, {"first_name": "Monty", "last_name": "Python", "id": 4, "number": 1}], "id": 0}