At 12:24 AM 2/27/04 -0500, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
Looking at PyProtocols, it doesn't seem to me to have taken simulations or gaming into account as a use-case. An indication of this is the seperability of the full component model from the interface / adapters system. Without a full understanding of the execution context of an adapter, I don't know how I could integrate external adapters like TTW login or email delivery into a simulation. (Pardon me for not being terribly specific here. It's difficult for me to come up with examples that take less than 5 or 6 pages of dull prose to explain.)
There was a recent discussion of writing an interactive fiction game using PyProtocols on the PEAK mailing list; the thread started here: http://www.eby-sarna.com/pipermail/peak/2004-February/001245.html Mostly, I told the guy what sort of component model sounded like it would work for what he was trying to do, and how to do that sort of component model with PyProtocols. To pull out your statement about execution context, though, I should mention that in PEAK, some adapters are "contextful" and others are not. The PEAK component model has the simple concept of things having parent components. Adapters that want to know about context make sure to set their parent to the thing they're adapting, or perhaps its parent. Whenever you put a component in another component, the container adapts the containee to binding.IAttachable if possible, and tells it, "hey, I might be your parent", so the containee can know its context. That's really about it for context. The binding and config packages then offers lots of useful APIs to walk up the parent tree to find or do things.
However, I am not sure, because I can't figure out what PEAK as a whole is really for. The likely source of an explanation, http://peak.telecommunity.com/Articles/WhatisPEAK.html seems awfully vague. What is the problem that PEAK was designed to solve, exactly? Clearly it was difficult, because there was a lot of solution :)
What is Twisted as a whole really for? ;) At least PEAK's name says exactly what it is: Python Enterprise Application Kit. It's a kit for writing enterprise applications in Python. Specifically, configurable, component-based applications. The PEAK core (aka peak.core) frameworks are a component architecture for building task-specific frameworks. The rest of PEAK is either task-specific frameworks (storage, events, net, commands, etc.), utility modules, or development/deployment tools (supervisor, version, n2, etc.)