Asko Soukka: ZServer reloaded with HTTP/2 and WebSocket support

A year ago, ZServer was one of the last Zope parts that did not run on Python 3. The idea was to use WSGI instead. I wondered why Python 3 would not be possible. So I tried porting it. It worked. And I added websocket support. You can use this to automatically push pages from Plone to Gatsby. Or show a notification when a page needs review, via content rules.

I replaced the old Medusa server with Twisted. ZServer was optionally using Twisted years ago, but this was ripped out, and I don't know why. But I got it working again. So for HTTP and webdav we have a Twisted http server and thread pool with an async FileSender, an AsyncIO/uvloop when avilable, standard ZConfig configuration and logging, And HTTP/2 works as well.

Bonus: websockets with PubSub messaging. It uses the Autobahn Twisted WebSocket protocol. ZeroMQ PubSub cockets using IPC-socket. The connection autosubscribes to local events. The server publishes a guarded event, for example indicating that an event is restricted to Editors.

One problem at this moment with the wsgi setup using waitress, is that the requests are limited to the number of wsgi threads, so server large files can become problematic. There are probably ways around this, but ZServer does not have this problem.

Status:

• My ZServer fork is at https://github.com/datakurre/ZServer. See mostly branch datakurre/master.
• You will need a special branch of plone.recipe.zope2instance as well.
• Plus collective.wsevents, plonectl, collective.taskqueue.

Upstream:

• In Zope 4, WebDav was made dependent on ZServer, by mistake?
• Zope 5 assumes ZServer and WebDav no longer exist.

Remaining steps:

• Get it upstream or not?
• Eliminate dead code.
• QA: tests, documentation
• Release it.
• Restore wsgi=off on Python 3.

I would be interested to hear when others are interested in using this. It is better if more people use this.

I am an introvert from Finland, so I did not ask the Zope people, or visited the Zope sprints.

Jens: There was no real reason to drop ZServer, except that no one has tried it because the code was so very old. Now you got it working, let's get this into Zope.

See the slides.