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Python sockets and requests

I'm a beginner in python and I'd like to know what the difference between socket and requests modules in python is. I'm sorry if this question format is bad, if this may be due to the fact that I do not know exactly how different protocols of Internet work, then I will be grateful if you share the relevant literature, so that I myself look for the answer to my question. Can you give examples?

How Everything is Related
Requests is one of the most used, highest level python HTTP clients. It is built on urllib3, which is built on httpclient lib. These are all HTTP application protocol libraries that utilize sockets to make calls, and thus sockets is foundation of them all.
More on the Foundational Sockets
Sockets are widely used with most Operating Systems to communicate with networks, since they can control tons of types of connections and transmit data. HTTP libraries rely on sockets, and thus there is no HTTP/TCP protocol connections without them. However, on the opposite side, sockets can exist without HTTP.
Conclusion
In the end, the requests library is fundamentally built on several libs with sockets being the (basically) bottom level. You’ll find that requests is the easiest to use since it is the highest level with the most documentation. You can also use pysocks, however it is much more difficult since it is lower level, but there is some documentation out there that can lead you to the right direction for making your own connections and sending your own encoded data to act as an HTTP request. The main trade off is pysocks are harder to work with, but much more customizable and fast. Most python web-apps/scrapers use requests, and sockets are used more rarely by experts in some cases.
More Reading
Intro to HTTP: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/http/index.htm
Distinguishing Between HTTP and HTTPS protocols are very important to the web: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/why-is-http-not-secure/
Requests (pythons objectively most widely used HTTP library): https://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/
Pysocks (pythons use of sockets): https://pypi.org/project/PySocks/
The Relation of Senders/Receivers (advanced): https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/layers-of-osi-model/

How does one properly setup Pyramid and ZeroMQ to provide a simple chat/messaging interface?

I'm trying to build a Pyramid app that uses ZeroMQ to provide a very simple chat/messaging interface, but I can't seem to figure out the proper setup/workflow.
The structure seems straightforward enough to me, and in its simplest form could be described in as little as two Pyramid "views"/routes:
The client SSE "show messages" view: This view/route would remain open to the client (using Server-Sent Events on the client-side and Pyramid's response.app_iter on the server-side), listening for messages from ZeroMQ and yielding them up to the client as they are received.
The "submit a new message" view: This view/route would receive POST requests containing a single message's data, which it would then pass to ZeroMQ to be received in the SSE view and displayed to any clients listening there.
For some reason however, I have not been able to come up with the correct recipe for accomplishing this feat. Google seems to be pretty sparse when it comes to recipes for 0MQ and Pyramid, and all of my own hacking has either resulted in Python/Pyramid thread/process problems, or 0MQ never being able to send or receive any messages (which is probably related to my threading issues).
So, how does one properly build this kind of an app with Pyramid?
P.S. You may assume any version of Python/Pyramid, etc in your answers. The point is to just get something that works as described.

I made a proof of concept of exactly that a few years back.
https://github.com/antoineleclair/zmq-sse-chat

Simple server/client string exchange protocol

i am looking for an abstract and clean way to exchange strings between two python programs. The protocol is really simple: client/server sends a string to the server/client and it takes the corresponding action - via a handler, i suppose - and replies OR NOT to the other side with another string. Strings can be three things: an acknowledgement, signalling one side that the other on is still alive; a pickled class containing a command, if going from the "client" to the "server", or a response, if going from the "server" to the "client"; and finally a "lock" command, that signals a side of the conversation that the other is working and no further questions should be asked until another lock packet is received.
I have been looking at the python's built in SocketServer.TCPServer, but it's way too low level, it does not easily support reconnection and the client has to use the socket interface, which i preferred to be encapsulated.
I then explored the twisted framework, particularly the LineOnlyReceiver protocol and server examples, but i found the initial learning curve to be too steep, the online documentation assuming a little too much knowledge and a general lack of examples and good documentation (except the 2005 O'reilly book, is this still valid?).
I then tryied the pyliblo library, which is perfect for the task, alas it is monodirectional, there is no way to "answer" a client, and i need the answer to be associated to the specific command.
So my question is: is there an existing framework/library/module that allows me to have a client object in the server, to read the commands from and send the replies to, and a server object in the client, to read the replies from and send the commands to, that i can use after a simple setup (client, the server address is host:port, server, you are listening on port X) having the underlying socket, reconnection engine and so on handled?
thanks in advance to any answer (pardon my english and inexperience, this is my first question)

Python also provides an asyncchat module that simplifies much of the server/client behavior common to chat-like communications.

What you want to do seems a lot like RPC, so the things that come to my mind are XMLRPC or JSON RPC, if you dont want to use XML .
Python has a XMLRPC library that you can use, it uses HTTP as the transport so it also solves your problem of not being too low level. However if you could provide more detail in terms of what you exactly want to do perhaps we can give a better solution.

Python: How can I use Twisted as the transport for SUDS?

I have a project that is based on Twisted used to
communicate with network devices and I am adding support for a new
vendor (Citrix NetScaler) whose API is SOAP. Unfortunately the
support for SOAP in Twisted still relies on SOAPpy, which is badly out
of date. In fact as of this question (I just checked), twisted.web.soap
itself hasn't even been updated in 21 months!
I would like to ask if anyone has any experience they would be willing
to share with utilizing Twisted's superb asynchronous transport
functionality with SUDS. It seems like plugging in a custom Twisted
transport would be a natural fit in SUDS' Client.options.transport, I'm just having
a hard time wrapping my head around it.
I did come up with a way to call the SOAP method with SUDS
asynchronously by utilizing twisted.internet.threads.deferToThread(),
but this feels like a hack to me.
Here is an example of what I've done, to give you an idea:
# netscaler is a module I wrote using suds to interface with NetScaler SOAP
# Source: http://bitbucket.org/jathanism/netscaler-api/src
import netscaler
import os
import sys
from twisted.internet import reactor, defer, threads
# netscaler.API is the class that sets up the suds.client.Client object
host = 'netscaler.local'
username = password = 'nsroot'
wsdl_url = 'file://' + os.path.join(os.getcwd(), 'NSUserAdmin.wsdl')
api = netscaler.API(host, username=username, password=password, wsdl_url=wsdl_url)
results = []
errors = []
def handleResult(result):
print '\tgot result: %s' % (result,)
results.append(result)
def handleError(err):
sys.stderr.write('\tgot failure: %s' % (err,))
errors.append(err)
# this converts the api.login() call to a Twisted thread.
# api.login() should return True and is is equivalent to:
# api.service.login(username=self.username, password=self.password)
deferred = threads.deferToThread(api.login)
deferred.addCallbacks(handleResult, handleError)
reactor.run()
This works as expected and defers return of the api.login() call until
it is complete, instead of blocking. But as I said, it doesn't feel
right.
Thanks in advance for any help, guidance, feedback, criticism,
insults, or total solutions.
Update: The only solution I've found is twisted-suds, which is a fork of Suds modified to work with Twisted.

The default interpretation of transport in the context of Twisted is probably an implementation of twisted.internet.interfaces.ITransport. At this layer, you're basically dealing with raw bytes being sent and received over a socket of some sort (UDP, TCP, and SSL being the most commonly used three). This isn't really what a SUDS/Twisted integration library is interested in. Instead, what you want is an HTTP client which SUDS can use to make the necessary requests and which presents all of the response data so that SUDS can determine what the result was. That is to say, SUDS doesn't really care about the raw bytes on the network. What it cares about is the HTTP requests and responses.
If you examine the implementation of twisted.web.soap.Proxy (the client part of the Twisted Web SOAP API), you'll see that it doesn't really do much. It's about 20 lines of code that glues SOAPpy to twisted.web.client.getPage. That is, it's hooking SOAPpy in to Twisted in just the way I described above.
Ideally, SUDS would provide some kind of API along the lines of SOAPpy.buildSOAP and SOAPpy.parseSOAPRPC (perhaps the APIs would be a bit more complicated, or accept a few more parameters - I'm not a SOAP expert, so I don't know if SOAPpy's particular APIs are missing something important - but the basic idea should be the same). Then you could write something like twisted.web.soap.Proxy based on SUDS instead. If twisted.web.client.getPage doesn't offer enough control over the requests or enough information about the responses, you could also use twisted.web.client.Agent instead, which is more recently introduced and offers much more control over the whole request/response process. But again, that's really the same idea as the current getPage-based code, just a more flexible/expressive implementation.
Having just looked at the API documentation for Client.options.transport, it sounds like a SUDS transport is basically an HTTP client. The problem with this kind of integration is that SUDS wants to send a request and then be able to immediately get the response. Since Twisted is largely based on callbacks, a Twisted-based HTTP client API can't immediately return a response to SUDS. It can only return a Deferred (or equivalent).
This is why things work better if the relationship is inverted. Instead of giving SUDS an HTTP client to play with, give SUDS and an HTTP client to a third piece of code and let it orchestrate the interactions.
It may not be impossible to have things work by creating a Twisted-based SUDS transport (aka HTTP client), though. The fact that Twisted primarily uses Deferred (aka callbacks) to expose events doesn't mean that this is the only way it can work. By using a third-party library such as greenlet, it's possible to provide a coroutine-based API, where a request for an asynchronous operation involves switching execution from one coroutine to another, and events are delivered by switching back to the original coroutine. There is a project called corotwine which can do just this. It may be possible to use this to provide SUDS with the kind of HTTP client API it wants; however, it's not guaranteed. It depends on SUDS not breaking when a context switch is suddenly inserted where previously there was none. This is a very subtle and fragile property of SUDS and can easily be changed (unintentionally, even) by the SUDS developers in a future release, so it's probably not the ideal solution, even if you can get it to work now (unless you can get cooperation from the SUDS maintainers in the form of a promise to test their code in this kind of configuration to ensure it continues to work).
As an aside, the reason Twisted Web's SOAP support is still based on SOAPpy and hasn't been modified for nearly two years is that no clear replacement for SOAPpy has ever shown up. There have been many contenders (What SOAP client libraries exist for Python, and where is the documentation for them? covers several of them). If things ever settle down, it may make sense to try to update Twisted's built-in SOAP support. Until then, I think it makes more sense to do these integration libraries separately, so they can be updated more easily and so Twisted itself doesn't end up with a big pile of different SOAP integration that no one wants (which would be worse than the current situation, where there's just one SOAP integration module that no one wants).

Best Python supported server/client protocol?

I'm looking for a good server/client protocol supported in Python for making data requests/file transfers between one server and many clients. Security is also an issue - so secure login would be a plus. I've been looking into XML-RPC, but it looks to be a pretty old (and possibly unused these days?) protocol.

If you are looking to do file transfers, XMLRPC is likely a bad choice. It will require that you encode all of your data as XML (and load it into memory).
"Data requests" and "file transfers" sounds a lot like plain old HTTP to me, but your statement of the problem doesn't make your requirements clear. What kind of information needs to be encoded in the request? Would a URL like "http://yourserver.example.com/service/request?color=yellow&flavor=banana" be good enough?
There are lots of HTTP clients and servers in Python, none of which are especially great, but all of which I'm sure will get the job done for basic file transfers. You can do security the "normal" web way, which is to use HTTPS and passwords, which will probably be sufficient.
If you want two-way communication then HTTP falls down, and a protocol like Twisted's perspective broker (PB) or asynchronous messaging protocol (AMP) might suit you better. These protocols are certainly well-supported by Twisted.

ProtocolBuffers was released by Google as a way of serializing data in a very compact efficient way. They have support for C++, Java and Python. I haven't used it yet, but looking at the source, there seem to be RPC clients and servers for each language.
I personally have used XML-RPC on several projects, and it always did exactly what I was hoping for. I was usually going between C++, Java and Python. I use libxmlrpc in Python often because it's easy to memorize and type interactively, but it is actually much slower than the alternative pyxmlrpc.
PyAMF is mostly for RPC with Flash clients, but it's a compact RPC format worth looking at too.
When you have Python on both ends, I don't believe anything beats Pyro (Python Remote Objects.) Pyro even has a "name server" that lets services announce their availability to a network. Clients use the name server to find the services it needs no matter where they're active at a particular moment. This gives you free redundancy, and the ability to move services from one machine to another without any downtime.
For security, I'd tunnel over SSH, or use TLS or SSL at the connection level. Of course, all these options are essentially the same, they just have various difficulties of setup.

Pyro (Python Remote Objects) is fairly clever if all your server/clients are going to be in Python. I use XMPP alot though since I'm communicating with hosts that are not always Python. XMPP lends itself to being extended fairly easily too.
There is an excellent XMPP library for python called PyXMPP which is reasonably up to date and has no dependancy on Twisted.

I suggest you look at 1. XMLRPC 2. JSONRPC 3. SOAP 4. REST/ATOM
XMLRPC is a valid choice. Don't worry it is too old. That is not a problem. It is so simple that little needed changing since original specification. The pro is that in every programming langauge I know there is a library for a client to be written in. Certainly for python. I made it work with mod_python and had no problem at all.
The big problem with it is its verbosity. For simple values there is a lot of XML overhead. You can gzip it of cause, but then you loose some debugging ability with the tools like Fiddler.
My personal preference is JSONRPC. It has all of the XMLRPC advantages and it is very compact. Further, Javascript clients can "eval" it so no parsing is necessary. Most of them are built for version 1.0 of the standard. I have seen diverse attempts to improve on it, called 1.1 1.2 and 2.0 but they are not built one on top of another and, to my knowledge, are not widely supported yet. 2.0 looks the best, but I would still stick with 1.0 for now (October 2008)
Third candidate would be REST/ATOM. REST is a principle, and ATOM is how you convey bulk of data when it needs to for POST, PUT requests and GET responses.
For a very nice implementation of it, look at GData, Google's API. Real real nice.
SOAP is old, and lots lots of libraries / langauges support it. IT is heeavy and complicated, but if your primary clients are .NET or Java, it might be worth the bother.
Visual Studio would import your WSDL file and create a wrapper and to C# programmer it would look like local assembly indeed.
The nice thing about all this, is that if you architect your solution right, existing libraries for Python would allow you support more then one with almost no overhead. XMLRPC and JSONRPC are especially good match.
Regarding authentication. XMLRPC and JSONRPC don't bother defining one. It is independent thing from the serialization. So you can implement Basic Authentication, Digest Authentication or your own with any of those. I have seen couple of examples of client side Digest Authentication for python, but am yet to see the server based one. If you use Apache, you might not need one, using mod_auth_digest Apache module instead. This depens on the nature of your application
Transport security. It is obvously SSL (HTTPS). I can't currently remember how XMLRPC deals with, but with JSONRPC implementation that I have it is trivial - you merely change http to https in your URLs to JSONRPC and it shall be going over SSL enabled transport.

HTTP seems to suit your requirements and is very well supported in Python.
Twisted is good for serious asynchronous network programming in Python, but it has a steep learning curve, so it might be worth using something simpler unless you know your system will need to handle a lot of concurrency.
To start, I would suggest using urllib for the client and a WSGI service behind Apache for the server. Apache can be set up to deal with HTTPS fairly simply.

SSH can be a good choice for file transfer and remote control, especially if you are concerned with secure login. Most Linux and Solaris servers will already run an SSH service for administration, so if your Python program use ssh then you don't need to open up any additional ports or services on remote machines.
OpenSSH is the standard and portable SSH client and server, and can be used via subprocesses from Python. If you want more flexibility Twisted includes Twisted Conch which is a SSH client and server implementation which provides flexible programmable control of an SSH stack, on both Linux and Windows. I use both in production.

I'd use http and start with understanding what the Python library offers.
Then I'd move onto the more industrial strength Twisted library.

There is no need to use HTTP (indeed, HTTP is not good for RPC in general in some respects), and no need to use a standards-based protocol if you're talking about a python client talking to a python server.
Use a Python-specific RPC library such as Pyro, or what Twisted provides (Twisted.spread).

XMLRPC is very simple to get started with, and at my previous job, we used it extensively for intra-node communication in a distributed system. As long as you keep track of the fact that the None value can't be easily transferred, it's dead easy to work with, and included in Python's standard library.
Run it over https and add a username/password parameter to all calls, and you'll have simple security in place. Not sure about how easy it is to verify server certificate in Python, though.
However, if you are transferring large amounts of data, the coding into XML might become a bottleneck, so using a REST-inspired architecture over https may be as good as xmlrpclib.

Facebook's thrift project may be a good answer. It uses a light-weight protocol to pass object around and allows you to use any language you wish. It may fall-down on security though as I believe there is none.

In the RPC field, Json-RPC will bring a big performance improvement over xml-rpc:
http://json-rpc.org/wiki/python-json-rpc