Mailman 3 July 2001 - Twisted

[Twisted-Python] bugs
by Chris Armstrong July 13, 2001

July 13, 2001

Ok, i've found the following bugs while figuring out why my personal webserver is not working. 1) in daemon mode, twistd is closing oldstdout, which later is needed if an exception is raised. (there's a traceback print on oldstdout) 2) skt.bind() in twisted/internet/tcp.py will fail if ~/.twisted-web-pb exists. I guess when the server is shut down it should delete this file. 3) Something else, after working around these two bugs, is preventing the personal webservers to work.

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[Twisted-Python] Ontology Links from the OpenCyc List
by Jason Asbahr July 13, 2001

July 13, 2001

Background material for your reading pleasure: " A complete list of ontology related web links is http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mfkb/related.html The OpenCyc ontology is a an update and amplification of the Cyc Upper Ontology whose tutorial is http://www.cyc.com/cyc-2-1/intro-public.html " J

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[Twisted-Python] Is everything speeding up, or am I slowing down?
by Glyph Lefkowitz July 10, 2001

July 10, 2001

Twisted version 0.9.0 is available, and the main TwistedMatrix.com website is running it! This release drops "Python" from the project's name; this will hopefully reduce confusion, and underscore the fact that we hope Twisted to be a cross-language environment. This release is bringing some cool functionality to Twisted. Perspective Broker is the culmination of my research and experimentation with RPC protocols. For those of you who remember it, this includes the original 'faucet' protocol, the obscure "V3" protocol, and both incarnations of Gloop; my extensive experiences with RMI, a bit of tinkering with XMLRPC, and my confusion at the sprawling standards base that is CORBA... I believe that PB will be a foundation for much of what makes Twisted really interesting in the coming releases. This evaluation is borne out by the fact that Allen has found it sufficiently interesting that he's already (before the release!) ported the encoding layer (banana) to 2 other languages! This is the first step towards cross-language compatibility. In other news, I am now with a company called Ninjaneering, where I may be leveraging some of the technology that we've built with Twisted. Have no fear, though! The Ninjas are very cool folks; the code will remain under my copyright control, and therefore released as LGPL. Some of you may recognize a fellow Ninjaneer, Sean Riley, the author of PyUI, in the CREDITS for this release. I am *very* glad I managed to rope Sean into helping me out with this code ;) I would like to put out a call for documentation at this point -- if any one of you out there knows enough to write a Twisted tutorial, or even a part of one, please do so :). The old "Philosophical Tutorial" has fallen seriously out of date as of this release and so it's been taken off the web. Even if you can't write a tutorial, simple patches correcting or adding docstrings would be greatly appreciated; I'd like the documentation to be clear, consistent, and concise, and right now it's somewhat of a mess and I find I don't have enough time to work on it. That's all for this release. Thanks for tuning in.

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[Twisted-Python] Flag Day
by Glyph Lefkowitz July 10, 2001

July 10, 2001

On Sunday, I plan to do a release of Twisted-0.9.0; things are looking like they're on track for that. This release will, among other things, add a new CVS module (named Twisted) and completely change how distributed webservers work. Gloop is going away completely, to be replaced by pb. If you are currently running a twisted server, you'll probably have to rebuild your .spl manually in order to get it to work with the new webserver. Since it will be looking for a different file to discover your distributed web service on, your current "personal" web services will be unavailable from sunday evening until you convert them to the new style. ______ __ __ _____ _ _ | ____ | \_/ |_____] |_____| |_____| |_____ | | | | @ t w i s t e d m a t r i x . c o m http://twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph

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[Twisted-Python] Twisted.pim
by Travis B. Hartwell July 9, 2001

July 9, 2001

Hey Twisted gang! Well, since Chris's mention of Twisted.pim in TWN #1, I have began to think a lot about how such a thing would be implemented. It has been my idea for a while now to implement some sort of tools to accomplish "Personal Information Management," and since glyph and his minions have been trying to drag me into this for a while, I decided to succumb. :) Chris (radix) and I discussed for a while today on IRC some of our ideas for what Twisted.pim would do and how it would be implemented. Short of boring you with a long log of our conversation, here is a brief summary of some of our ideas. I submit them here for your review, criticism, praise, and volunteering to help write this! :) What is it? First of all, Twisted.pim should be more than what traditional PIMs offer (think of the Palm apps, KOrganizer, Outlook, etc.). The main function of those applications is to handle appointments, contacts, and to-do lists -- but all of that separately. It's almost like they are "Personal Appointment, Things to do, and Contact Managers" instead of a more broad "Personal _Information_ Managers." Let me illustrate with a couple of examples of what I mean: Example 1: Integration. Normally, when I have an appointment scheduled, it will involve something I have stored elsewhere -- whether it be contact info for someone, or perhaps an item on my to-do list, or a memo I had made earlier. With the Palm and other traditional PIM's, it isn't possible to link this information. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to click on an icon, or select an item from a list, from within that appointment view that would take to you the related information? Or that you could take notes on that particular meeting and those notes show up with your memos and perhaps with your completed to-do item? Example 2: Information management. I like to take notes on what I'm studying and working on. Perhaps it is notes on how to complete a particular phase of a project at work. Or maybe they are notes for a class at school. Or perhaps it is notes on something new I learned in sys admin stuff. I would love to be able to store these notes, be able to cross reference them, and sometimes associate them with to-do lists or appointments. Or store links to information I found on the web or whatever. So, for example, when I see on a weekly view that I have a test coming up, I could look at that appointment and have a link to my class notes to view them. So, I am concerned about here more types of data being stored than the usual, yet all of them being able to be related and associated together. I've been doing a lot of reading lately of the works of Stephen R. Covey, specifically "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and "First Things First." He talks a lot about different generations of tools used is managing and organizing one's time and resources. Without going into too much detail, I want to be able to use Twisted.pim to center my life on my "mission statement" and goals stemming from that, then be able to manage my life from this. The linking and different views stemming from my ideas of Twisted.pim are essential for me to do this. Other than going beyond a tradition PIM in what data is stored and how it can be associated it, building this upon Twisted brings up some interesting possibilities. First of all, my main interest is having ubiquitous access to my data, so this truly will be a useful tool for me. So, whether it be through an interface to Emacs, a GTK view, a Web interface, or whatever, I want access to the same data and same functionality. Eventually, I would love to get an Agenda or another PDA running Linux and ideally this would run on it as well. Secondly, because it is built upon Twisted, this leads well to a multi-user type of system. Almost a groupware type of application. This leads to questions of authorization and ownership of data items and who has permission to view them. I will lead the design of such items to people such as glyph who is the "man with the internet." So, basically, in a long nutshell, those are my ideas now of what Twisted.pim should do. How will it be implemented? Here are notes of some of the things radix and I thought. I'm not too good at design of such systems right now, so this is where I need a lot of help. * Have a base class for all of the data types, that would include shared items such as association info, name, owner, etc. Example data types descended from this would be appointment, to-do item, memo, etc. * Implement twisted.pim.associator which will provide the support for associating and linking data items together. * 'middle-end' classes which the UI viewers talk to. Examples of these would be the calendar view, the to-do list viewer, etc. * And of course, the UI's of which would include Emacs modes, GTK interfaces, web pages, etc. * Use the new twisted.pb to handle the access to this data, except in the case of our small, handheld clients which would access the middle-end objects directly, due to the hardware restraints on these systems. For access of local data on desktop machines, it would just connect to localhost. * Anyone volunteer to work on Pippy to get this sort of thing to work on the Palm? * And, until I get a PDA to run this on, I would like conduits to export this data to my Palm. Other than that, the implementation is kinda fuzzy right now. I want to get better at designing such things. Hopefully all of you ubercoders can help me figure this out. :) Thanks for listening to my ideas! Nafai

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[Twisted-Python] TWN #2!
by Chris Armstrong July 9, 2001

July 9, 2001

The second issue of Twisted Weekly News is up on the Twisted Matrix web site. Check it out at http://twistedmatrix.com/pages/twn-2.html. -- Chris Armstrong carmstro(a)twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/~carmstro carmstro(a)dynup.net

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[Twisted-Python] Look mommy, it's an installer!
by Juergen Hermann July 5, 2001

July 5, 2001

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[Twisted-Python] after being royalty in spain
by Glyph Lefkowitz July 4, 2001

July 4, 2001

TDFL pronouncement: we're going with "Twisted" as the name. I'm renaming and restructuring the CVS repository right now. Most everything is moving into packages within twisted. The new directory structure is attached. I'll be importing a "Twisted" CVS module some time tonight. ______ __ __ _____ _ _ | ____ | \_/ |_____] |_____| |_____| |_____ | | | | @ t w i s t e d m a t r i x . c o m http://twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph

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[Twisted-Python] TWN issue #1!
by Chris Armstrong July 3, 2001

July 3, 2001

* The TwistedPython Weekly News * 1st Issue. Monday, July 2, 2001 QOTW: --> java (dutkiewicz(a)91.portland-01-02rs.or.dial-access.att.net) has joined #python <java> yes <-- java (dutkiewicz(a)91.portland-01-02rs.or.dial-access.att.net) has left #python <glyph> goodbye, java <glyph> hehe, that's surprisingly satisfying to say Welcome to the TwistedPython Weekly News. This is the first issue, so it will cover a larger time-frame than a single week. If we find that we do not have enough news for an issue every week, we may change it to the TwistedPython Monthly News. * Progress * After a period of low activity, there were a lot of new changes in the Twisted code base. Here are some summaries. * Refactorings: Chris Armstrong did a lot of work refactoring both twisted.web and twisted.reality. The web refactoring was finished on 2001-06-11 and twisted.reality on 2001-06-20. During these refactorings, a change to the Coding Standard was required, as Chris found that Python has limitations on circular imports in packages. Sibling imports were allowed in this case ("import html" instead of "from twisted.web import html"). * Twisted Explorer: Chris started doing an interactive Object Browser that he eventually wants to write a Reality front-end to, and has been heard rambling about a potential 3d interface. * Other stuff: There have been other minor hacks lately: Chris started rewriting calendar.py, the web calendar, and started the twisted.pim package with the 'todo' module. There is a web-based front-end for todo, and an instance of it is running here. There have also been a few additions to net and authenticator. * Name Change: There has been talk of a name change. The name "Twisted Python" is definitely going, as it can mislead people to believe that it's some sort of distribution of Python (Most Python ports/distributions are "Something Python"). Two ideas so far are just "Twisted" or "TwistedMatrix". * Short-term Todo * Watch out for some cool new things coming to TwistedPython. * Chris is working on a spell-casting system for Twisted Reality. * Jason Asbahr will be working on InstanceMessenger, a new messaging system based on the new PerspectiveBroker. * Watch out for twisted.pim. Glyph is getting an Agenda VR3 soon and he wants Twisted Python running on it. :) * Interesting Thing Of the Week: * The Twisted PerspectiveBroker After much mucking about, Glyph finally refactored ProxyBroker into PerspectiveBroker. This is probably the most exciting new development for Twisted Python in recent time. pb is a replacement for Gloop, which mainly uses cPickle for serialization of objects. pb, on the other hand, uses 'jelly', a home-made serialization library which uses S-Expressions. This is going to be a very central part of TPy, and we're all very excited about it. Go Glyph! Ok, that's it for this week. Thanks for reading! Chris Armstrong -- Chris Armstrong carmstro(a)twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/~carmstro carmstro(a)dynup.net

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[Twisted-Python] vfs-draft
by benjamin bruheim July 2, 2001

July 2, 2001

Hepp, ramblings coming up. while working on twisted.ftp I had to add a system to virtualize the dirs, so I began to outline a vfs of some kind. it does not deal with direct interaction with files, but rather lists them and so on. There's plenty of design issues left, but since I'm not that self-confidient on how to work this thing out, I felt like letting you have a peek on the idea as it is now. Radix suggested it could be used to provide a user-space which is seperated from the OS. It's a short test, and it uses authenticator. To test it, you need to rewrite the paths heavily. you guys can handle that ;) The example-code is at the bottom. There's loads of comments up front, but many of those are not longer valid. The part which creates most problem is the 'userFileSystem' atm. See for yourself: http://www.twistedmatrix.com/users/phed/vfs.py Feedback, and give your opinions! And when the filesystem is done, I have some suggested projects of extra FileSystems as 'archiveFileSystem' (as in .zip-files), 'configFileSystem' and 'emailattachmentFileSystem'. ;) (Sure...) benjamin http://mp3.com/benjamin

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