Typically the way to do this would be to use a thread pool and queue downloads which would issue a signal, a.k.a an event, when that task has finished processing. You can do this within the scope of the threading module Python provides.
However, a quick and dirty demonstration of what you can do using a simple threading.Thread implementation can be seen below:
import os
import threading
import time
import urllib2
class ImageDownloader(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, function_that_downloads):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.runnable = function_that_downloads
self.daemon = True
def run(self):
self.runnable()
def downloads():
with open('somefile.html', 'w+') as f:
try:
f.write(urllib2.urlopen('http://google.com').read())
except urllib2.HTTPError:
f.write('sorry no dice')
print 'hi there user'
print 'how are you today?'
thread = ImageDownloader(downloads)
thread.start()
while not os.path.exists('somefile.html'):
print 'i am executing but the thread has started to download'
time.sleep(1)
print 'look ma, thread is not alive: ', thread.is_alive()
It would probably make sense to not poll like I'm doing above. In which case, I would change the code to this:
import os
import threading
import time
import urllib2
class ImageDownloader(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, function_that_downloads):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.runnable = function_that_downloads
def run(self):
self.runnable()
def downloads():
with open('somefile.html', 'w+') as f:
try:
f.write(urllib2.urlopen('http://google.com').read())
except urllib2.HTTPError:
f.write('sorry no dice')
print 'hi there user'
print 'how are you today?'
thread = ImageDownloader(downloads)
thread.start()
# show message
thread.join()
# display image
import gevent
from gevent import monkey; monkey.patch_all()
greenlet = gevent.spawn( function_to_download_image )
display_message()
# ... perhaps interaction with the user here
# this will wait for the operation to complete (optional)
greenlet.join()
# alternatively if the image display is no longer important, this will abort it:
#greenlet.kill()
Everything runs in one thread, but whenever a kernel operation blocks, gevent switches contexts when there are other "greenlets" running. Worries about locking, etc are much reduced, as there is only one thing running at a time, yet the image will continue to download whenever a blocking operation executes in the "main" context.
Depending on how much, and what kind of thing you want to do in the background, this can be either better or worse than threading-based solutions; certainly, it is much more scaleable (ie you can do many more things in the background), but that might not be of concern in the current situation.