README.md

DISCOS BACKEND

This package defines a reference implementation for the protocol used by discos for communicating with external backends. The protocol is defined at http://discos.readthedocs.org/en/latest/developer/protocols/backends.html

Package contents

This package implements a parser for the protocol grammar as well as a twisted protocol which exploits the parser. The handlers module also defines some simple protocol handlers which can be used for testing and protocol simulation, giving at the same time a good starting point for other implementations.

Requirements

• twisted for the the server implementation
• astropy for time management
• coverage and prospector are used for test execution

Dependencies can be installed via pip:

  $ pip install -r requirements.txt

The same can be done for testing dependencies:

  $ pip install -r testing_requirements.txt

Using the package

You can have an idea about how to integrate your own discos protocol implementation into the tcp server by looking at the test/backend_simulator.py module which defines a Backend class. If you need to define your own implementation you can just mimic its behaviour by implementing your own class which redefines all the public methods (the one which do not start with _).

You can run the server using your protocol definitions, just like the definition in scripts/run_server.py:

from discosbackend import server
from discosbackend.handlers import DBProtocolHandler
 
from yourmodule import YourBackend

tcp_port = 8978
server.run_server(
    tcp_port, DBProtocolHandler(YourBackend())
)

Testing your implementation

Once you write your own implementation of the protocol you can test it just like it's done in test/test_simulator_server.py. You can safely reuse the tests defined in this TestCase, all you need to do is to redefine the setUp and tearDown methods to let them launch your own implementation.

Testing the package

The package tests can be run with the provided script run_tests .

  $./run_tests

It will print to screen test results as expected while also generating a coverage html report in htmlcov/index.html.