Programming Social Applications

Building a Subscriber in Python

Note

The full code for this sample is available at https://github.com/jcleblanc/programming-social-applications/tree/master/chapter_10/pubsubhubbub-subscriber-python.

Now let’s explore the same subscriber implementation, but now using Python. For this example, the subscriber classes are stored in a file name subscriber.py:

import re import urllib import urllib2 ''' ' Class: Subscription Error ' Description: Custom error class for subscription exceptions ''' class SubscribeError(Exception): def __init__(self, value): self.value = value def __str__(self): return repr(self.value) ''' ' Class: Subscriber ' Description: Provides ability to subscribe / unsubscribe from hub feeds ''' class Subscriber: regex_url = re.compile('^https?://') #simple URL string validator #constructor that stores the hub and callback URLs for the subscriber def __init__(self, hub, callback): if self.regex_url.match(hub): self.hub = hub else: raise SubscribeError('Invalid hub URL supplied') if self.regex_url.match(callback): self.callback = callback else: raise SubscribeError('Invalid callback URL supplied') #initiates a request to subscribe to a feed def subscribe(self, feed): return self.change_subscription('subscribe', feed) #initiates a request to unsubscribe from a feed def unsubscribe(self, feed): return self.change_subscription('unsubscribe', feed) #makes request to hub to subscribe / unsubscribe def change_subscription(self, mode, feed): #check if provided feed is a valid ...