This is very interesting and sounds simple enough to get started. It seems to solve my long-poll problem fine. The other issue I'm dealing with is high-latency network iOS holding up the process/thread. Does push-pin have a solution for that? I'm dreaming but this is what I want to tell push-pin: "I want to invoke this out-bound API...Hold this http request, go invoke this API and call me back when the call is complete...". Basically an out-bound proxy with similar benefits. I looked at gevent/greenelets to make python concurrency work but it all seems a bit unnatural to me.
Hmm, that's definitely outside the scope of pushpin, but it's an interesting idea for a different project perhaps.
I guess you want a proxy that you could tell to make an HTTP request on your behalf but would return immediately. And then it would make an HTTP request back to you once it has received the remote response.
Another of our projects is Zurl, which is used for async outbound HTTP. You'd have to write some zmq handler code but potentially it could be appropriated for what you're trying to do.