'''

ItemProcessor

Written by: John Fink

Takes a list of objects, and a function, and some optional arguments to
that function.  Runs that function (with those optional arguments) against
each element of the input list, in parallel.  Results from each function
call can be retrieved in a list of tuples (along with the input) with
.result(), which will also optionally (by default) join and block until
the entire list is finished.

Sample usage:

tasks = [1,2,3,4,5,6]
def test(num,val):
    return num > val

print itemprocessor.ItemProcessor(tasks).start(test,3).result()
'[(1, False), (2, False), (3, False), (4, True), (5, True), (6, True)]'

'''

import multiprocessing

class ItemProcessor(object):
    def __init__(self,task_list,process_count=10):
        self.m=multiprocessing.Manager()
        self.tasks=self.m.Queue()
        self.results=self.m.list()
        for task in task_list:
            self.tasks.put(task)
        self.process_count=process_count
    def join(self):
        return self.tasks.join()
    def _worker_process(self,*args,**kwargs):
        func=kwargs['func']
        del kwargs['func']
        while True:
            try:
                task=self.tasks.get_nowait()
            except:
                return
            self.results.append((task,func(task,*args,**kwargs)))
            self.tasks.task_done()
    def start(self,func,*args,**kwargs):
        for i in xrange(0,self.process_count):
            kwargs['func']=func
            thread=multiprocessing.Process(target=self._worker_process,args=args,kwargs=kwargs)
            thread.start()
        return self
    def result(self,join=True):
        if join:
            self.join()
        return list(self.results)