Phil Hunt
rosetta1 kind-of does what I want, but not quite, when I try to fetch the URL http://localhost:1450/xxx?aaa=bbb&c=12345 in my web browser, it says request.path = /xxx, whereas I'm interested in the variable/value pairs as well, i.e. /xxx?aaa=bbb&c=12345
Ah, yeah, that would be a difference between that and the simpler HTTP handler object in the standard library. The Twisted support code automatically parses out the arguments for you and makes them available from the request object (passed in to the render method in rosetta1) in the args attribute. It's a dictionary keyed by variable, with the value being a list of values supplied. The value is always a list even if only one instance of the variable occurs in the URL. So in your example here, in the render() method, request.args would be set to {'aaa':['bbb'],'c':['12345']}.
If I wrote a program like this that was invoked by the ``python'' program rather than ``twistd'', would that make a difference it what it can do?
Not particularly - you can pretty much do anything in either case, but the sequence of how to initialize things (and how much work you might need to do to accomplish a particular initialization) will differ. twistd provides some standard startup handling, but you can initialize things and run the reactor yourself if you want. For example, one way to have a more standalone version would be to replace the bottom portion of rosetta1 (starting from "application = " down) with: site = server.Site(resource=MyResource()) reactor.listenTCP(1450, site) reactor.run() and you'd need a "from twisted.internet import reactor" at the top (and could remove the application imports). It's not exactly identical since the application/service approach is initializing a more flexible framework, but for this example, the end result is the same. With the above change you could just run the script with Python. You can pretty much do anything you want at that point, although you need to get to the reactor.run() for most stuff to start running. You can also hang other services off of your application object and do other initialization in the twistd/tac case. I don't tend to use twistd that much myself, but I'm sure for others it's what they prefer. Oh, and if you'd like to see some simple logging of requests and what not you can just enable logging by: import sys from twisted.python import log at the top, and log.startLogging(sys.stdout) before creating your site. I think the equivalent is just a command line option with twistd. -- David