WARNING: This is from spyne's development branch. This version is not released yet! Latest stable release can be found in the 2_10 branch.

Spyne aims to save the protocol implementers the hassle of implementing their own remote procedure call api and the application programmers the hassle of jumping through hoops just to expose their services using multiple protocols and transports.

In other words, Spyne is a framework for building distributed solutions that strictly follow the MVC pattern, where Model = spyne.model, View = spyne.protocol and Controller = user code.

Spyne comes with the implementations of popular transport, protocol and interface document standards along with a well-defined API that lets you build on existing functionality.

Spyne currently supports the WSDL 1.1 interface description standard, along with SOAP 1.1 and the so-called HttpRpc, XmlDocument, JsonDocument, YamlDocument, MessagePackDocument and MessagePackRpc protocols which can be transported via Http or ZeroMQ. The transports can be used in both a client or server setting.

The following are the primary sources of information about spyne:

• Spyne's home page (that also has the latest documentation) is: http://spyne.io/
• The latest documentation for Spyne can be found at: http://spyne.io/docs
• The official source code repository is at: https://github.com/arskom/spyne
• The official spyne discussion forum is at: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/soap
• You can download Spyne releases from github or pypi.

Spyne is a generalized version of a Soap library known as soaplib. The following legacy versions of soaplib are also available in the source repository at github as branches:

• Soaplib-0.8 branch: http://github.com/arskom/spyne/tree/soaplib-0_8
• Soaplib-1.0 branch: http://github.com/arskom/spyne/tree/soaplib-1_0
• Soaplib-2.0 was never released as a stable package, but the branch is still available: http://github.com/arskom/spyne/tree/soaplib-2_0

Spyne is known to work on Python versions 2.6 and 2.7. We're also looking for volunteers to test Python 3.x.

The only hard requirement is pytz which is available via pypi.

Additionally the following software packages are needed for various subsystems of Spyne:

• A Wsgi server of your choice is needed to wrap spyne.server.wsgi.WsgiApplication
• lxml>=2.3 is needed for any xml or html related protocol.
• SQLAlchemy is needed for spyne.model.complex.TTableModel.
• pyzmq is needed for spyne.client.zeromq.ZeroMQClient and spyne.server.zeromq.ZeroMQServer.
• Werkzeug is needed for using spyne.protocol.http.HttpRpc under a wsgi transport.
• PyParsing is needed for using HttpPattern's with spyne.protocol.http.HttpRpc. (PyParsing>=2.x is Python 3 only).
• Twisted is needed for spyne.server.twisted.TwistedWebResource and spyne.client.twisted.TwistedHttpClient.
• Django (tested with 1.2 and up) is needed for spyne.server.django.DjangoApplication and spyne.server.django.DjangoServer.
• Pyramid is needed for spyne.server.pyramid.PyramidApplication.
• msgpack-python is needed for spyne.protocol.msgpack.
• PyYaml is needed for spyne.protocol.yaml.
• simplejson is used when found for spyne.protocol.json.

You are advised to add these as requirements to your own projects, as these are only optional dependencies of Spyne, thus not handled in its setup script.

You can get spyne via pypi: :

easy_install spyne

or you can clone from github: :

git clone git://github.com/arskom/spyne.git

or get the source distribution from one of the download sites and unpack it.

To install from source distribution, you should run its setup script as usual: :

python setup.py install [--user]

To run the tests use: :

pyhon setup.py test

The test script first installs every single library that Spyne integrates with, in the current directory, so be ready to do some fiddling with your distro's package manager in case you don't want this, or have a fully functional python development environment ready so that packages like lxml can compile.

Finally if you want to make any changes to the Spyne code, just use :

python setup.py develop [--user]

so that you can painlessly test your patches.

The main developers of Spyne lurk in the official soap implementors forum kindly operated by python.org. That's mostly because Spyne is the continuation of soaplib, but also because Soap is an important part of Spyne.

You can also use the 'spyne' tag to ask questions on Stack Overflow.

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.rst file in the Spyne source distribution for information about how you can help Spyne get more awesome.