the-giant: Redis protocol toolkit - Think it like a wsgi server but speaks redis

Fast and lightweight asynchronous redis server implementation that does nothing. Think it like wsgi server that speaks redis.

Possible use cases

As far as I can think of you can do:

Implement a fast communication channel between backend services:

You can easily handle thousands of connections with the-giant, and redis protocol is fast and the-giant is really fast too. So you can do things in a different way. Eg. you can start 100 workers in the background, and push your jobs to them and keep the connection open, so they immediately push back the results. Of course there are alternative ways to do the same, you can do the same with an MQ server, you push your jobs to the broker and pull results back, or you can use zeromq.

Writing a redis proxy - possibly with some intelligence:

Like you ask for a key from the-giant, and your app checks the key in your cache then asks to your database if its not in the cache etc. Or one can implement something like mysql-proxy or a load balancer for redis etc...

Writing a redis clone:

Please don't try to do it and just install redis :)

Why ?

For a personal project, I needed to collect data from different servers and persist them to disk. I first used ZeroMQ, but its really not very easy to install in different servers - your milage may vary - but almost all languages have a working redis client implementation, so it seemed wise to write a redis server.

Do I need it ?

Probably not. Depending on the task, you might do the same thing with more rock-solid, more production tested technologies. Use RabbitMQ, Celery etc. or use a stateless http server etc, or use keep-alive with an http server or try using ZeroMQ.

Why It's Cool

• Small, low memory footprint.
• Single-threaded.

Installation

libev

Arch Linux

pacman -S libev

Ubuntu

apt-get install libev-dev

Mac OS X (using homebrew_)

brew install libev

FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE

cd /usr/ports/devel/libev/ && make install clean

the-giant

Make sure libev is installed and then:

python setup.py install

or just use

pip install thegiant

Usage

''' simple key value server '''
import thegiant
from thegiant.helpers import OK

h = {}
def app(e):
    if (e['REDIS_CMD'][0] == 'SET'):
        h[e['REDIS_CMD'][1]] = e['REDIS_CMD'][2]
        return OK
    elif (e['REDIS_CMD'][0] == 'GET'):
        v = h[e['REDIS_CMD'][1]]
        return reply(v)
thegiant.server.run(application, '0.0.0.0', 6380)

Documentation

http://ybrs.github.com/the-giant/