About

Louie is based on PyDispatcher. Here is a very good detailed description of what both PyDispatcher and Louie offer you, based on the description available at the PyDispatcher website.

PyDispatcher provides a multiple-producer-multiple-consumer signal-registration and routing infrastructure, suitable for use in multiple contexts.

The dispatcher mechanism is particularly useful when constructing Model-View-Controller style applications where it is not desirable to have the Model objects aware of the event model.

To be more concrete about what PyDispatcher does for you, here are some specifics:

  • A centralized service delivers messages to registered objects in the local process. You can register any number of functions or other callable objects which can receive signals from senders.
    • Registration can be for any sender, particular sending objects, or “anonymous” messages (messages where the sender is None).
    • Registration can be for all signals, or particular signals.
    • A single signal will be delivered to all appropriate registered receivers, so that multiple registrations do not interfere with each other.
    • The sender or receiver need not be be dispatcher-aware. Any Python object, except for None, can act as a sender, and any callable object can act as a receiver.
    • The system uses weak references to receivers wherever possible.
    • Object lifetimes are not affected by PyDispatcher registrations. When your object goes away, the registrations related to the object also go away.
    • References to common transient objects (instance methods in particular) are stored as compound weak references.
    • Weak references can be disabled on a registration-by-registration basis.
  • It allows rich signal types. Signals must simply be hashable objects; they are otherwise opaque to the dispatch mechanism.
  • Positional and keyword arguments may be attached to a signal when sending. For each receiver, PyDispatcher sends each receiver the arguments that they expect; other arguments are silently dropped. Thus, receivers can be general in nature, even ignoring all arguments, or they can be specific, accepting whichever arguments it needs.