python web service for a network appliance - python

As there are so many options to write web service in python, I am a bit confused. I have developed a network appliance, its about Private VLANs.
I want to add to it authenticated web service over HTTPS.
It won't be accessed by regular users. It will be accessed just by other systems looking for some network information. Maybe at a later point I'll build an ajax web client which will use it.
There are endless python options. I am not a web programmer, nor I have the time to be one.
All I need is something each is easy to learn and to implement with the following requirements:
Easy to learn. I just need to expose some sqlite tables/views/queries through authenticated web services.
HTTPS support
basic authentication, where I implement the authentication script.
Any suggestions?
The OS is OpenBSD.
Thanks,
Dan

Related

Client-Server framework for python

I'm currently working on a University project that needs to be implemented with a Client - Server model.
I had experiences in the past where I was managing the communication at socket level and that really sucked.
I was wondering if someone could suggest an easy to use python framework that I can use for that purpose.
I don't know what kind of details you may need to answer so I'm just going to describe the project briefly.
Communication should happen over HTTP, possibly HTTPS.
The server does not need to send data back or invoke methods on the clients, it just collects data
Many clients send data concurrently to server, who needs to distinguish the sender, process the data accordingly and put the result in a database.
You can use something like Flask or Django. Both frameworks are fairly easy to implement, Flask is much easier than Django IMO, although Django has a built in authentication layer that you can use, albeit more difficult to implement in a client/server scenario like you need.
I would personally use Flask and JWT (JSON Web Tokens), which will allow you to give a token to each client for authentication with the server, which will also let you differentiate between clients, and you can use HTTPS for your SSL/TLS requirement. It is tons easier to implement this, and although I like django better for what it brings to the table, it is probably overkill to have you learn it for a single assignment.
For Flask with SSL, here is a quick rundown of that.
For JWT with Flask, here is that.
You can use any database system you would like.
If I understood you correctly you can use any web framework in python. For instance, you can use Flask (I use it and I like it). Django is also a popular choice among the python web frameworks. However, you shouldn't be limited to only these two. There are plenty of them out there. Just google for them.
The implementation of the client depends on what kind of communication there will be between the clients and the server - I don't have enough details here. I only know it's unidirectional.
The client can be a browser accessing you web application written in Flask where users send only POST requests to the server. However, even here the communication will bidirectional (the clients need to open the page which means the server sends requests back to the client) and it violates your initial requirement.
Then it can be a specific client written in python sending some particular requests to your server over http/https. For instance, your client can use a requests package to send HTTP requests.

Service management using RESTful requests

I am currently working on a project where we need to establish communication like an ESB, between a REST API and the apps services on a small scale.
Scenario:
Assume a web app front end (e.g. Django/Python or Ruby/Rails) and services that are accessible via a HTTP RESTful request.
How can I:
make it configurable which web services are called on a web request depending on the request and not requiring code changes (through keys for example)
encapsulate or implement the services in a way to make it easy to manage them e.g. start/stop etc.
I have been looking at spring.io, but cant work out whether this could be used for the this??
I am open to all suggestions,
Thanks
From what I understand, you want an authorisation solution.
In Rails, Pundit and CanCanCan are very popular. You could also implement it from scratch. Here is a screencast to help you get started.

Build a TCP proxy on Google App Engine

I'm trying to figure out how to build a TCP proxy on GAE (Google App Engine). I would ordinarily do it using twisted networking engine but GAE doesn't allow frameworks. I'm also pretty new to internet and networking technologies in general.
Basically I have a proxy server and I'd like to use GAE as a TCP proxy to relay everything to the primary proxy server. All the GAE front ends are connected to the back end by google fiber, so if I make the back end near the primary proxy server, it should make it super fast regardless of where I'm connecting from.
Unfortunately GAE doesn't allow me to control ports at all and everything that I'm reading either tells me how to configure a TCP proxy on a server that I'm in complete control of or how to configure a proxy where I type the url into a webpage in the browser. Something along the lines of making a personal http://www.hidemyass.com/proxy/ type of website.
I'd like to set it up so I can simply tell chrome to ignore certificate errors (it connects to a dynamic IP using HTTPS so there's no way to sign it but I trust myself) and put the proxy info into chrome.
Edit: I'd prefer to write it in python but I can do any language
Thanks in advance
P.S. Please don't give answers like just use GoAgent or tor or something. They don't fulfill my purpose.
If you're simply trying to proxy HTTP requests like GoAgent does then have a look at the URLFetch documentation for Google App Engine.
URL Fetch Python API Overview
If you're trying to proxy anything else, then Daniel is correct.
This isn't the sort of thing you can use GAE for.
I don't know where you got the idea that GAE "doesn't allow frameworks". Of course it does, anything that speaks WSGI (eg Django, Flask, Pylons) is fine. But GAE is a web platform: it's not an appropriate place to try and write any sort of bare-metal networking platform. Apart from anything else, bandwidth on GAE is fairly expensive.
And also I don't know where you think the GAE "front ends" are, as opposed to the "back ends". GAE is not split that way, AFAIK.
I don't really understand what exactly you are trying to do, but it sounds like a content delivery network (CDN) like Akamai might be more appropriate.

Python / Django Web service Confusion

I am trying to explore more about web service in Python/Django and to be honest i am quite confused. There are so many things like SOAPpy, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC RESTful, web service.
Basically all i want to know is what is the standard way of implementing web service in Python/Django and has anyone implemented in live production environment
There isn't a 'standard' way, but a lot of people (including me) have used -- and like! -- Django Piston, which is actually also used to create the web service for BitBucket (where piston's source is hosted)
Also, if you're still learning about web services, I can highly recommend the O'Reilly book RESTful Web Services -- although it's a book with a focus on REST (which I agree is the best design pattern for a web service) it also explains RPC and SOAP, too.
There are so many things like SOAPpy, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC RESTful, web service.
This should give you a clue - there are different services out there that use one or more of these mechanisms.
Basically all i want to know is what is the standard way of implementing web service in Python/Django and has anyone implemented in live production environment
There is no single standard way of implementing a web service. This is as true for Django/Python as for other web frameworks.
Different people have used Django in different ways to create a web service to suit their needs.

How do you develop against OpenID locally

I'm developing a website (in Django) that uses OpenID to authenticate users. As I'm currently only running on my local machine I can't authenticate using one of the OpenID providers on the web. So I figure I need to run a local OpenID server that simply lets me type in a username and then passes that back to my main app.
Does such an OpenID dev server exist? Is this the best way to go about it?
The libraries at OpenID Enabled ship with examples that are sufficient to run a local test provider. Look in the examples/djopenid/ directory of the python-openid source distribution. Running that will give you an instance of this test provider.
I have no problems testing with myopenid.com. I thought there would be a problem testing on my local machine but it just worked. (I'm using ASP.NET with DotNetOpenId library).
The 'realm' and return url must contain the port number like 'http://localhost:93359'.
I assume it works OK because the provider does a client side redirect.
I'm also looking into this. I too am working on a Django project that might utilize Open Id. For references, check out:
PHPMyId
OpenId's page
Hopefully someone here has tackled this issue.
I'm using phpMyID to authenticate at StackOverflow right now. Generates a standard HTTP auth realm and works perfectly. It should be exactly what you need.
You could probably use the django OpenID library to write a provider to test against. Have one that always authenticates and one that always fails.
Why not run an OpenID provider from your local machine?
If you are a .Net developer there is an OpenID provider library for .Net at Google Code. This uses the standard .Net profile provider mechanism and wraps it with an OpenID layer. We are using it to add OpenID to our custom authentication engine.
If you are working in another language/platform there are a number of OpenID implementation avalaiable from the OpenID community site here.
You shouldn't be having trouble developing against your own machine. What error are you getting?
An OpenID provider will ask you to give your site (in this case http://localhost:8000 or similar) access to your identity. If you click ok then it will redirect you that url. I've never had problems with livejournal and I expect that myopenid.com will work too.
If you're having problems developing locally I suggest that the problem you're having is unrelated to the url being localhost, but something else. Without an error message or problem description it's impossible to say more.
Edit: It turns out that Yahoo do things differently to other OpenID providers that I've come across and disallow redirections to ip address, sites without a correct tld in their domain name and those that run on ports other than 80 or 443. See here for a post from a Yahoo developer on this subject. This post offers a work around, but I would suggest that for development myopenid.com would be far simpler than working around Yahoo, or running your own provider.

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