Pubsub Home page

Note

This site is specific to PyPubSub v3.1.2 and prior. The up-to-date site is always at pubsub.sf.net.

The Python Pubsub package provides a publish - subscribe API that allows data to be sent between different parts of your application. In many cases, using publish - subscribe in your application will dramatically simplify its design and improve testability. Robin Dunn, the creator of wxPython, summerizes Pubsub nicely:

Basically you just have some part(s) of your program subscribe to a particular topic and have some other part(s) of your program publish messages with that topic. All the plumbing is taken care of by pubsub. – Robin Dunn, Jun 2007

The Publish - Subscribe pattern has the following capability:

• It allows parts of an application to send messages to other parts of it, such that the programmer need not know
  • if the messages will be handled:
    • perhaps the message will be ignored completely,
    • or handled by a many different parts of the application;
  • how the messages will be handled:
    • what will be done with the message and its contents;
    • if a return value will be received;
• It allows parts of an application to be notified of changes to data in such a way that the programmer need not know the source of the data

A listener is “a part of the application that wants to receive messages”. A listener subscribes to one or more topics. A sender is any part of the application that asks Pubsub to send a message of a given topic. The sender provides data, if any. Pubsub will send the message, including any data, to all listeners of the message’s topic.

Schematically:

Contributing

Please consider contributing to this project! More details in the Contributing section.