PythonD: 4Suite or Twisted?

[Moshe Zadka]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, "Thomas Weholt \( PRIVAT \)" <2002 at weholt.org> wrote:

> Just a warning; when you mention "threaded" and "webserver" in this group in
> the same sentence, you'll probably get several replies telling you that
> threaded webservers scale badly and that you should look at ( you guessed
> it) Twisted or Medusa.

This warning deserves a meta-warning: whenever you mention Twisted in this
group, a couple of Twisted developers will happily jump on board and
correct you :)

> Twisted are slowly getting a proper documentation together

"Slowly getting proper documentation"? Do you not consider a 250 page
book "proper documentation"? (That's just the HOWTOs and manpages.
The API documentation is not distributed in a paged format, but it
is so big that people have asked me to split it off from the twisted-doc
package to lower size demands.

For the things which Twisted has been able to do for a while, we have
pretty good documentation -- for example, the low-level protocol layer
and the low-level web layer are pretty well documented. The newer
stuff (like Woven) is starting to get documented. In fact, right now,
I believe the only serious documentation lack is woven.guard.

> It still seem a
> bit bloated and some of the code is labeled unstable, yet the the package
> seem to be marketed as complete and stable.

"Complete" is certainly not a term I would apply to Twisted. There are
a number of lacks -- one is a web client which is as flexible as urllib2
and asynchronous. However, for most people's needs, Twisted is complete
enough, and it is certainly more featureful than medusa.

> I keep seeing things like "It
> should really be re-written/re-factored " etc. in the twisted-mailing-list.

However, there are few changes of API. The Twisted team takes backwards
compatibility seriously, and most old code continues to work just fine.

> But all in all, as I said before, I think Twisted might be the new killer
> app if the development-team keeps the development progress they seem to have
> at the moment.

I believe Twisted is already a killer app for Python :)

-- 
Moshe Zadka -- http://moshez.org/
Buffy: I don't like you hanging out with someone that... short.
Riley: Yeah, a lot of young people nowadays are experimenting with shortness.
Agile Programming Language -- http://www.python.org/