[Zope] Socket Serving with Zope

[Douwe Osinga]

Hi Zopers,

I'm trying to build a semi-real time game with a Flash client and a Zope
server. Flash allows to kinds of server communication, connected sockets and
http. Using Zope with the latter is relatively easy, but implies that the
clients poll the server all the time, just in case there is something for
them. Also, creating http connections all the time is relatively slow and
costs resources. It would be better to use a socket based approach.

I tried the Swocket project (http://swocket.sourceforge.net) and it works
fine, but programming against it is by far not as elegant as programming in
Zope and debugging is very hard indeed. So I am thinking of a socket server.
The first option would be to have something like swocket run in parallel
with Zope with a protocol to call zope methods over xml-rpc or something.
The other option would be to create a socket server in zope, maybe in a
static variable of a product (I understand that they are not flushed by
Zope). The first option is probably easier, but you still have the xml-rpc
overhead (though less of a need for polling with the clients). The second
one sounds complicated.

Any ideas on this or similar projects? I found an irc product that might be
of some help. Haven't tried it though.

Douwe Osinga
http://douweosinga.com