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Web Server Gateway Interface(WSGI)
Some of the most popular Python web frameworks implement WSGI (stands for Web Server Gateway Interface). WSGI is essentially a set of specifications for a universal interface between web server and web applications, to be implemented by web server software for handling requests from Python-based web application. WSGI specifications were first introduced in 2003 (PEP 333) and later updated in 2010 (PEP 3333).
A WSGI Application object is invoked by the server by passing the following arguments −
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environ − A Python dict object which is similar to CGI environment variables and certain WSGI specific variables.
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start_response − A callback function to be used by the application to return its response along with headers and status code.
This object can be any callable object as in Python such as a function, method, a class or its instance with __call__() method available to it. This application object must return an iterator consisting of a single byte string.
def application (environ, start_response): ... ... return [("Hello World!".encode("utf-8")]
However, WSGI-enabled servers are synchronous in operation, because of which the applications are not that efficient. Python started asynchronous programming support with version 3.4 by introducing the asyncio module as a part of the standard library.
The asyncio module provides the ability to incorporate in Python applications a style of concurrent programming (which is often called cooperative multitasking). In this approach, the operating system doesn’t obstruct the context switching among different processes. Instead, a process yields periodically to accommodate other processes so that many applications can run simultaneously.
In Python’s version 3.5, these two keywords async and await were added. A Python function defined with the async keyword becomes a coroutine and hence can’t be run like a normal function. Instead, we need to call it using asyncio.run (coroutine). The execution of a coroutine can be made to pause till the completion of another coroutine by the await keyword.
import asyncio async def main(): print(''hello'') await asyncio.sleep(5) print(''world'') asyncio.run(main())
Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface(ASGI)
ASGI stands for Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface (as per its official documentation, it is a spiritual successor to WSGI), it adds the async capabilities to Python web servers, applications and frameworks.
An ASGI application is an asynchronous callable object (a user-defined function or an object of a class having __call__() method). It takes three arguments as follows −
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Scope − A dict containing details of a specific connection
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Send − An asynchronous callable, by which event messages can be
sent to the client -
Receive − Another asynchronous callable. The application can receive event messages from the client.
Following is the prototype of a simple ASGI application represented by an asynchronous function −
async def app(scope, receive, send): assert scope[''type''] == ''http'' await send({ ''type'': ''http.response.start'', ''status'': 200, ''headers'': [ [b''content-type'', b''text/plain''], ], }) await send({ ''type'': ''http.response.body'', ''body'': b''Hello, world!'', })
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