Sure! The Meteor client and the Meteor server speak a protocol called DDP, which runs over websockets or HTTP long polling. Meteor clients can connect to any DDP server and vice versa. So you just need to implement a DDP server for Python.
I love the DDP as a concept. It's akin to REST-on-steroids, over a websocket with pubsubhubbub sprinkled on top. I really wish more people knew about it, I hope drivers are adapted quickly (some have been). Interoperability & extensibility will make it a killer web feature.
I know I sound like a fundamentalist, but how is anything like REST? It's an RPC protocol! Nothing against RPC, but it doesn't fit any of the REST constraints, except for the client-server; it's not stateless, it can't have middle-man caching and it doesn't really follow an uniform interface. It's nothing like REST (and as such it doesn't get its benefits).
Speaking as the protocol designer, the eventual intention for DDP is to model reactive data set publishing in a sufficiently semantic way that it can be cached by proxies. We didn't get there in pre1 and decided to not let that block Meteor 1.0, but it is the goal for the future when we have some post-1.0 breathing room (and when the Meteor community needs it.)
The idea behind DDP is that HTTP got us three huge benefits: (1) shared tooling (I can write a caching proxy, and anyone with a website can use it); (2) interchangeable parts (your client and your server can be built with totally different languages and frameworks); and (3) easy APIs (I can describe my site's REST-y API to you in a page or two). These days, a lot of sites are moving away from REST/HTTP and toward ad-hoc, custom publishing schemes that run over websockets or a HTTP long-polling transport that is emulating websockets. Since they use these ad-hoc protocols to move around data rather than something like REST, they lose (1), (2), and (3). But all of these ad-hoc protocols are basically isomorphic to each other. DDP is an attempt to nail this kernel of data publishing functionality down semantically to the point that you can get those three benefits back.
As an aside, what's the pressure that's pushing these apps away from REST? The two big ones are:
- They cache data locally and need to keep the cache fresh (say they are apps that run in your browser and never reload the page, or they are native mobile apps), and they don't want to poll for updates. And/or,
- They need to do joins and they care about latency. (When you are loading the news feed, you want to fetch the feed stories, the comments, and the userpic URLs in one round trip, not first request the stories, and then only once you have them request the comments.)
Also, many modern apps have verbs that don't map well to REST (a RPC like transferBalance affects multiple objects and doesn't map well to the idea of updating the representation of an object identified by a URL), and many modern apps need to perform some form of latency compensation (predicting the outcome of a RPC and simulating it locally to update the client's display while waiting for the server's answer, but then reverting to the authoritative outcome chosen by the server.)
DDP attempts to address these needs and run over a stream transport like websockets, while recovering some of the benefits of standardization that made REST so successful.
Thanks; I can perfectly understand the advantages of having a standard protocol, and if DDP becomes an effective standard for applications outside of Meteor, it'll be a great achievement. I just wish people were more aware of what REST really means.
DDP seems like a good technology for webapps, but the issue is that I find webapps a really uninspiring trend in web development; my vision for the web is much more data-oriented than the code silos we're all making. And I believe the lack of understanding of what REST means is preventing people from seeing a bigger picture.
Also, many modern apps have verbs that don't map well to REST (a RPC like transferBalance affects multiple objects and doesn't map well to the idea of updating the representation of an object identified by a URL)
I've heard that a lot, and I don't doubt that it's true in many cases, but usually it seems more representative of a difficulty in the modeling process.
For example, a transferBalance call certainly doesn't map well to updating any object, but creating a new Transfer (and passing the URLs of both Accounts) would be perfectly RESTful, in my opinion.
> but the issue is that I find webapps a really uninspiring trend in web development; my vision for the web is much more data-oriented than the code silos we're all making.
DDP is pretty simple (just a few messages) and the spec for the 'pre1' version of the protocol is in Git: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/livedat...
This is pretty close to version '1' of the protocol that will be locked down in Meteor 1.0: https://trello.com/c/kMkw800Z/53-official-ddp-specification