Hi Jason, I was up for revamping the front page until school hit, but in about a month I'll be back and ready for action and happy to help with this / provide feedback. You might find this IRC snippet about the front page relevant: 21:27 < jesstess> exarkun: so you're saying "Want an IRC bot? BAM follow this link. Want a TCP server? BAM follow this link?" for the top 5 things people try to implement? 21:27 < exarkun> jesstess: something like that, yea 21:28 < jesstess> exarkun: I'd be up for working that up. 21:31 < exarkun> jesstess: It would be awesome if you could work on that. I think it will help a lot. 21:32 < exarkun> jesstess: I think it's also important to have the website direct people quickly and easily to the documentation they need. 21:33 < exarkun> jesstess: There are too many clicks involved now, so they might not even find a new set of topic-oriented guides. 21:33 < jesstess> exarkun: I'll do it if you give me a list of the top 5 applications people try to write :) 21:33 < exarkun> jesstess: Doing something about that would be another highly productive task. 21:33 < exarkun> ah, there's the rub. 21:34 < radix> 1. IRC bot that execs python code, 2. caching web proxy 21:34 < radix> 3. XMPP something 21:34 < radix> 4. MMORPG 21:35 < radix> I can't think of a fifth 21:35 < jesstess> does "simple TCP server" really not make the list? That's why I first used Twisted. 21:35 < thijstriemstra> mimic skype..ish 21:36 < thijstriemstra> chat, streaming, authentication, porn 21:36 < exarkun> jesstess: not sure if it comes in the top five 21:36 < exarkun> probably the top ten though 21:36 < Screwtape> I'd say half the questions in here have something to do with IRC bots. -Jessica On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 8:53 PM, Jason J. W. Williams < jasonjwwilliams@gmail.com> wrote:
I guess I am. :)
Honestly, we've used Twisted in my org for quite some time and until I was forced to use it my view of it was colored by my infrequent beatings by it and the derisive comments of the primary maintainer at that time.
With the 4 hours I spent actually learning the concepts, Twisted is no longer a black box...it makes sense. That and I've optimized/re-factored a bunch of code to work with that theory instead of against it. Huge benefits.
I'd say the biggest barrier to entry is the documentation. And let's face it...there's no reason Twisted shouldn't be used by more folks. It's great...but learning it feels like a frat hazing. That's largely because reading the docs feels like learning from that comp sci prof who was smart...but wasn't smart enough to explain the concepts at your level.
Let's take Tornado for a second...right now I'm building a web API for our services and I'm in platform selection mode. My experience with Twisted.web's URL dispatching system made me want to cry. Tornado was a breeze to use. But here's the problem:
1.) There's no good async libraries for Tornado...so if I want to integrate with Redis or MySQL or anything, I've got to accept that I'm going to block when it's not necessary and live with that. 2.) Tornado's performance from the the benchmarks I've read is only between 15% and 30% better than twisted.web.
2 is not enough to justify 1, because let's face it (and yeah I'm coming to a point) 1 is going to kill your butt often enough to make 2 not matter.
But because I'm pretty comfortable with Twisted now...it makes more sense for me to write my own dispatcher that emulates Tornado's than give up all the rock-hard awesome features and reliability of Twisted. deferToThread may not be the preferred way of handling a blocking task...but when you need it, you need it.
...so my point is...Twisted's PR problem is it needs more accessible docs. They need to be understandable, entertaining...and pretty. It all starts with that front page...and the web app in 10 lines right smack dab there.
I'm going to start with the front page...and then I'm going to write some articles on my blog that are what I wanted when I was learning Twisted. Hopefully, they'll be of use to someone.
-J
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Glyph Lefkowitz <glyph@twistedmatrix.com> wrote:
On Apr 20, 2010, at 7:06 PM, Jason J. W. Williams wrote:
And yes I'm volunteering to reorg.
Wow, you really are a glutton for punishment, aren't you? :) Go ahead and create an alternate front-page wiki page, and let the list
know
when it's ready so we can pile on and critique. I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to do better than what's there, though. Looking forward to it, -glyph _______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
_______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python