Txnamedpipes: using Windows namedpipes with twisted

At Ubuntu One we required to be able to use named pipes on windows for IPC. This is a ver normal process in multi-process applications like the one we are going to provide, but in our case we had a twist, we are using twisted. As some of you may know there is not default reactor that would allow you to write a protocol in twisted and allows to use named pipes as the transport of the protocol. Well this was until very recently.

Txnamedpipes (lp:txnamedpipes) is a project that provides a ICOP based reactor that allows to use namedpipes for the transport of your protocol. At the moment we are confident that the implementation would allow you to use spred.pb or a custom protocol on twisted 10 and later on Windows 7 (we have been able to find a number of issues on Windows XP). The following is a small example of a spread.pb service and client that uses a named pipe for communication.

from txnamedpipes.reactor import install
install()
from twisted.spread import pb
from twisted.internet import reactor
 
class Echoer(pb.Root):
    def remote_echo(self, st):
        print 'echoing:', st
        return st
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    reactor.listenPipe('\\.\pipe\test_pipe',
                               pb.PBServerFactory(Echoer()))
    reactor.run()

from txnamedpipes.reactor import install
install()
from twisted.spread import pb
from twisted.internet import reactor
from twisted.python import util
 
factory = pb.PBClientFactory()
reactor.connectPipe('\\.\pipe\test_pipe', factory)
d = factory.getRootObject()
d.addCallback(lambda object: object.callRemote("echo", 
                      "hello network"))
d.addCallback(lambda echo: 'server echoed: '+echo)
d.addErrback(lambda reason: 'error: '+str(reason.value))
d.addCallback(util.println)
d.addCallback(lambda _: reactor.stop())
reactor.run()

The code has the MIT license and we hope that other people find it useful.