[Ifeffit] How to use Larch as function server

[ASAKURA, Hiroyuki]

Dear Matt,

Thank you for your prompt response.

If I understand correctly, Athena works with Larch by making command strings (Text::Template?) and submitting it to Larch via XML-RPC.
So, it would be the best way, as you suggested.
>       server.larch("grp = read_ascii('/path/to/xas/data')")

I understand you don't plan to expose (all of) "low" functions, too.
I intended to use Larch in loose-coupling (without knowledge of a Larch session status) with my app, so I have to go another way.

Thanks again,

Hiroyuki


On 2019/03/03 23:26, Matt Newville wrote:
> Hi Hiroyuki,
> 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 11:40 PM ASAKURA, Hiroyuki <
> asakura at moleng.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> 
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I would like to use Larch as an external function server.
>> I'm a Python novice, but if I understand correctly, the present server
>> (larch -r) provides access to a Larch process controllable with xmlrpc from
>> outside.
>>
>> However, I would like to do something like below to achieve looser
>> coupling with my future code (maybe not in python).
>> How can I do that?
>> I appreciate any suggestion for my first step to go, though I guess it is
>> a bit far from the Larch way.
>>
> 
> Running Larch in "server mode" is definitely possible but also sort of
> advanced programming.  I should clarify something:  you should start a
> server with the `larch_server start`, not `larch -r`.  This should be
> removed from the `larch` command and fixed in the docs.
> 
> Once the server process is running, client processes can send commands to
> run and receive data from the larch session running in the server process.
> The server process can be on a different machine, but I should admit that
> I've only done this in tests.   The functions available to the client are
> pretty limited (definitely not all larch commands) and meant to be "high
> level".  They include:
> 
>       larch                             send larch commands as strings to the server
>       get_data                          get data encoded in json
>       get_rawdata                       get data with json encoding
>       get_messages, len_messages        get messages printed by the server
>       ls, chdir, cd, cwd                setting the working directory for the server
>       shutdown,  set_keepalive_time     shutdown server, delay shutdown due to no activity
>       set_client_info, get_client_info  set/get information about the client using this server
> 
> There isn't anything as specific as "read_ascii()" function.  Instead, you
> would do
> 
>       from xmlrpc.client import ServerProxy
>       server = ServerProxy("http://127.0.0.1:4966")
> 
>       # send a string to run as a larch command
>       server.larch("grp = read_ascii('/path/to/xas/data')")
> 
> We could consider adding more exposed functions, but the server has to
> register each exposed function (see
> https://github.com/xraypy/xraylarch/blob/master/larch/xmlrpc_server.py#L121
> ), so I would not want to try to expose every function in the Larch API.
> 
> The client application can be in any language that supports XML-RPC
> communication.   Many languages do have an XML-RPC library, though they
> might differ in some features like how to unpack data into native
> datatypes.   For example, a Perl implementation so that Demeter can use a
> larch server as its backend is at
> https://github.com/bruceravel/demeter/blob/master/lib/Larch.pm
> 
> If you are interested in doing that for another language let me know if I
> can be of any help.
> 
> Hope that helps, but if I missed the some part of your question, please let
> me know....
> 
> --Matt
> 
> 
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-- 
ASAKURA, Hiroyuki (Ph.D)
Program-Specific Senior Lecturer (ESICB)
T. Tanaka Lab., ESICB, Kyoto University, Japan
asakura at moleng.kyoto-u.ac.jp
http://www.moleng.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~moleng_04/asakura/