alex clemesha wrote:
On Jan 23, 2008 4:36 PM, <glyph@divmod.com <mailto:glyph@divmod.com>> wrote:
On 12:10 am, clemesha@gmail.com <mailto:clemesha@gmail.com> wrote: >Thanks Steve Holden for organizing this, it's a great idea.
Indeed! >Some nice topics might include:
Thanks for the suggestions. Do you have any others? :-)
For my usage of twisted, these are important to me and I am the most familiar with them. (See below)
I hate to rain on your parade here, but I think maybe my explanation of why I don't like these suggestions will spark discussion of more different ones... >a) Start off simple with a " twisted.web2" example (everyone "gets" >http)
I think that this is actually something we should avoid in a tutorial. The web situation in Twisted is complicated ( http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/WebDevelopmentWithTwisted). web2 in particular is suffering from an extreme lack of maintenance and still has never "officially" been released; work is just starting to get underway to unify t.web2 and nevow into t.web and reduce the confusion, but this is all still in progress and who knows when, how, or even if it will be completed.
Oh yes, I know, I know. While learning twisted I read *most* (that's alot ;) of posts to the twisted-web mailing list. So I am very familiar with the state.
Interesting. I am also subscribed to the twisted.web newsgroup, and I have been surprised about how quiet it's been. I imagine that if twisted.web2 would be very good for things like high-volume web services work. It has relatively few advantages in the heavily-competitive templating world, and I have to say that my early experience with Nevow, while it caused me to admire the system, wasn't entirely trouble-free. I think that may be partly because it wasn't being used in a Twisted environment (I'm thinking of the python.org reorganization that was put in effect after PyCon 2006).
That said, oh how I wish you guys could make twisted.web2 the one and only!!! It would be good for beginners and others alike.
Note however: I can only barely imagine how hard that might be, so I am *definitely not* complaining ... Twisted is excellent, thanks very much for it.
Hear, hear. And the world needs to know, hence my enthusiasm for "Teach Me Twisted".
If you get a group of experienced Twisted folks together to talk about writing web applications, you're more likely to spark a debate than an educational session.
Twisted's not alone there, of course.
Even if all these problems were fixed, and there were a really good, well-supported, universally understood web server for Twisted, the benefits of Twisted's programming model are not immediately obvious to the bread and butter of the web programming world. Learning how to use some combination of Twisted tools to generate a web page will always be at least a little bit harder than writing the sort of glorified CGI script that most web frameworks require these days - unless you're using something like Athena, which might be too much complexity to address in a single tutorial session. (And while Athena is more polished and "one right way" than the lower-level HTTP stuff, there is still a painful dearth of documentation, not to mention the fact that you need to write JavaScript as well as Python.)
Right. I think a Django replacement might be a bit ambitious for an open space session or two ... Maybe once I get into Twisted I'll be able to lend a hand with t.w2 development (or maybe not).
"Comet" (aka what Athena does) is one of my main uses of twisted, see
http://svn.xantus.org/shortbus/trunk/cometd-twisted/
is some code that I use.
That and other ajax-y stuff. Not much templating html, etc.
That's neat, but definitely a few too many layers for a starter project.
Twisted really shines best when you're writing a client as well as a server. Chat is the quintessential application where Twisted makes the most sense - and the lack of a well-documented chat server is much less of a problem than the lack of a well-documented web server, since you can easily define a wire protocol and wacky semantics for your purpose- built tutorial chat application.
Yes!
I'd suggest possibly a client/server game , but I am under the impression that's already taken care of.
>b) then plug that into a simple sqlite database using >" twisted.enterprise"
twisted.enterprise is similarly a scary and inconsistent area, and requires understanding the interaction of the DB thread and the reactor thread. (And at least part of this section would have to be dedicated to "and never, ever touch anything in this package aside from adbapi".)
We'll definitely stay away from that, then.
I only ever use 'adbapi'. The reason I say this is database functionality is pretty darn important for all non-trivial programs, so programmers need/want to know about this functionality, wouldn't you agree?
Important but not fundamental, I'd say.
>d) Show how using "twistd" is really convient >(i.e. "twistd -ny server.tac" and "twistd -y server.tac", with some >logging >capability, etc)
Yes, yes, yes! If I could come away with a clear understanding of how a .tac file encapsulated one or more Twisted network services I'd be happy.
This, however, is a great suggestion. Twisted plugins should be part of this discussion.
Yes.
Thanks again for Twisted!
This is great. Keep it coming! Still looking for reading suggestions ... regards Steve -- Steve Holden +1 571 484 6266 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/