Spyne, TLS and server-to-client requests

Question

Does Spyne support TLS security and server-to-client requests (communication symmetry) through the usage of the ZMQ underlaying transport?

Spyne's API reference (http://pythonhosted.org/spyne/reference/index.html) and, in case of the ZeroMQ server it says:

class spyne.server.zeromq.ZeroMQServer(app, app_url, wsdl_url=None)[source]
    transport = 'http://rfc.zeromq.org/'

... where it links to the RFC of the ZeroMQ organization. I do not know whether this involves that all transport protocols (including TLS) are supported by Spyne since ZeroMQ supports them.

I found out that the ZeroMQServer implements only the Zero.REP communications mode and, therefore, I would not expect to be capable of performing neither TLS nor server-to-client responses, in accordance with the API documentation of the ZMQ project. — nsx, Oct 25 '13 at 01:05

Burak Arslan · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-28T14:08:20.857

Spyne maintainer here.

Spyne does not support communication symmetry. You'd have to implement a new breed of transport (mixed one) that deals with the challenges of using a single connection for multiple messages both ways. But it's certainly doable, I can't think of anything in Spyne's design that would slow you down.
That link to the ZeroMQ RFC is analoguous to the Http transport linking to http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/http/ -- i.e. just an unambigous way to denote which ZeroMQ we're talking about.

The ZeroMQ transport was an experiment to see how ZeroMQ fared in an RPC setting. I did not like what I saw, so I moved on.

As you noted, the only supported scheme is REQ/REP and if REQ/REP sockets can be switched to TLS just by switching the URL, it'll work. Otherwise, well, you're on your own.

Btw, the latest docs are at http://spyne.io/docs

And concerning the symmetry of Spyne, can a server invoke a remote procedure of a connected client using that connection and not establishing a new one subjected to NAT/firewall issues? — nsx, Oct 25 '13 at 18:01

Spyne, TLS and server-to-client requests

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