Thoughts filed in: Programming

Thread progress monitoring in Python

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My recent hobby hack-together, my photo cleanup tool FotoJazz, required me getting my hands dirty with threads for the first time (in Python or otherwise). Threads allow you to run a task in the background, and to continue doing whatever else you want your program to do, while you wait for the (usually long-running) task to finish (that's one definition / use of threads, anyway — a much less complex one than usual, I dare say).

However, if your program hasn't got much else to do in the meantime (as was the case for me), threads are still very useful, because they allow you to report on the progress of a long-running task at the UI level, which is better than your task simply blocking execution, leaving the UI hanging, and providing no feedback.

As part of coding up FotoJazz, I developed a re-usable architecture for running batch processing tasks in a thread, and for reporting on the thread's progress in both a web-based (AJAX-based) UI, and in a shell UI. This article is a tour of what I've developed, in the hope that it helps others with their thread progress monitoring needs in Python or in other languages.