Hello, I have a small wxPython application. Today I was trying to add some RPC capability to it, so I implemented an instance of SimpleXMLRPCServer that runs in a separate thread when invoked and answers requests.
All went fine until I realized that I have to sometimes stop the server - which is where I ran into a problem. Python threads can not be killed after they've been started. They can be kindly requested to end, but it's up to the thread itself to decide when it wants to finish. At least this is my understanding. It probably makes sense, because threads can hold resources which can't just be dropped suddenly, and have to be cleaned in a proper manner. (Does this sound like the truth ?) Anyway, this creates a problem because SimpleXMLRPCServer likes to block and never return. I dug deeper and found out that all offspring of SocketServer can only handle requests in a blocking manner. Even if you call handle_request( ) and not serve_forever(), it will block until a request is received and handled. This means that a SocketServer object running in a thread blocks the thread, and this thread can not be stopped. Is there any graceful solution to this problem ? I suppose I can use sockets in non-blocking mode, or use select(), but this will mean I will have to implement my server with raw sockets and not a handy helper like SocketServer. For the XML-RPC server I want this is a headache, as I will probably have to implement my own XML- RPC server based on raw non-blocking sockets. Thanks in advance for any ideas and suggestions Eli -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
