python - Websockets with Tornado: Get access from the "outside" to send messages to clients

Question

I'm starting to get into WebSockets as way to push data from a server to connected clients. Since I use python to program any kind of logic, I looked at Tornado so far. The snippet below shows the most basic example one can find everywhere on the Web:

import tornado.httpserver
import tornado.websocket
import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web

class WSHandler(tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler):
    def open(self):
        print 'new connection'
        self.write_message("Hello World")

    def on_message(self, message):
        print 'message received %s' % message
        self.write_message('ECHO: ' + message)

    def on_close(self):
    print 'connection closed'


application = tornado.web.Application([
  (r'/ws', WSHandler),
])


if __name__ == "__main__":
    http_server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(application)
    http_server.listen(8888)
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

As it is, this works as intended. However, I can't get my head around how can get this "integrated" into the rest of my application. In the example above, the WebSocket only sends something to the clients as a reply to a client's message. How can I access the WebSocket from the "outside"? For example, to notify all currently connected clients that some kind event has occured -- and this event is NOT any kind of message from a client. Ideally, I would like to write somewhere in my code something like:

websocket_server.send_to_all_clients("Good news everyone...")

How can I do this? Or do I have a complete misundersanding on how WebSockets (or Tornado) are supposed to work. Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to keep track of all the clients that connect. So:

clients = []

def send_to_all_clients(message):
    for client in clients:
        client.write_message(message)

class WSHandler(tornado.websocket.WebSocketHandler):
    def open(self):
        send_to_all_clients("new client")
        clients.append(self)

    def on_close(self):
        clients.remove(self)
        send_to_all_clients("removing client")

    def on_message(self, message):
        for client in clients:
            if client != self:
                client.write_message('ECHO: ' + message)