Python publish subscribe

In keeping with the theme of my previous post, I'd like to mention that the publish-subscribe event pattern can also be used in Python. The zope.event package provides this functionality. For example, If I want to publish a topic when Blog objects in my application are updated, I could do something like:

import zope.event

class Blog:
 def update(self):
     self._update()
     zope.event.notify('blogupdate')

This will send a notification to anyone in my application that has a subscription to blogupdate. To subscribe to this topic, we could do something like:

import zope.event

def sub_blogupdate():
  log('Blog updated.')
zope.event.subscribers.append(sub_blogupdate)

The subscription would obviously do something more important but this serves well to illustrate the general concept. Publish-subscribe comes in handy when there is a chain of complex events. The zope.event package, although very simplistic, allows us to produce higher quality code.