Update:

I switched this back from answered as I tried the solution posed in cogent Nick's answer and switched to Google's urlfetch:

logging.debug("starting urlfetch for http://%s%s" % (self.host, self.url))
result = urlfetch.fetch("http://%s%s" % (self.host, self.url), payload=self.body, method="POST", headers=self.headers, allow_truncated=True, deadline=5)
logging.debug("finished urlfetch")

but unfortunately finished urlfetch is never printed - I see the timeout happen in the logs (it returns 200 after 5 seconds), but execution doesn't seem tor return.

Hi All-

I'm attempting to play around with Twitter's Streaming (aka firehose) API with Google App Engine (I'm aware this probably isn't a great long term play as you can't keep the connection perpetually open with GAE), but so far I haven't had any luck getting my program to actually parse the results returned by Twitter.

Some code:

logging.debug("firing up urllib2")
req = urllib2.Request(url="http://%s%s" % (self.host, self.url), data=self.body, headers=self.headers)
logging.debug("called urlopen for %s %s, about to call urlopen" % (self.host, self.url))
fobj = urllib2.urlopen(req)
logging.debug("called urlopen")

When this executes, unfortunately, my debug output never shows the called urlopen line printed. I suspect what's happening is that Twitter keeps the connection open and urllib2 doesn't return because the server doesn't terminate the connection.

Wireshark shows the request being sent properly and a response returned with results.

I tried adding Connection: close to my request header, but that didn't yield a successful result.

Any ideas on how to get this to work?

thanks

-Simon