[Twisted-Python] Re: pretzel

Chris Armstrong carmstro at twistedmatrix.com
Fri Oct 5 19:34:48 EDT 2001


On Fri, Oct 05, 2001 at 04:20:30PM -0500, Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
[snip]
> just ridiculous.  (Not in the coding standard yet but will be soon -- 
> distinctiveness and brevity are preferred at the module level for 
> naming, but descriptiveness and clarity are what you need for classes 
> and methods)

Alright, I've commited changes. UserAgent and MessageDistributor sound OK?

> This thread began for me (and for the list archiver, apparently) with 
> "Re: pretzel".  I have no idea what "pretzel" is or where it came from, 
> and so far it sounds like a pretty bad idea.  Could someone please 
> explain it in depth?  Especially expound upon "Twisted doesn't have this 
> yet; a centralized place where a bunch of objects can send messages to 
> and receive messages from other objects."  This is at once maddeningly 
> vague and precise enough to be completely incorrect.

Don't get too angry with me =) Really all pretzel is is a bit of glue code.
The idea behind it is basically an "IRC bot on crack" -- only not dependant
on the IRC part. It's a pluggable bot, that can support whatever types of
communication media you want it to, be it Words, IRC, a quake server, a
MUD, etc. Twisted really doesn't have this yet -- even if I used PB or
somesuch I'd have to actually implement the same stuff, basically. And this
definitely doesn't need PB, since none of it would ever need to be
spreadable.

"SaltGrains" (now UserAgents), are, like I said in my last email (i'm not
sure if you got it), basically just clients that know how to talk to some
service and thus talk to the other users on that service. the
MessageDistributor (formerly "BreadStick") takes messages from these agents,
and distributes them to the rest of the agents. It's really very simple,
thus backing up my claim that it's just a bit of glue code. =) The cool
stuff is going to be the different UserAgents and Features we implement.
We'll have Quake servers giving us deathmatch stats, and we'll be talking to
people on MUDs and other IRC networks.

As you may've noticed, yes, this will be a ry-killer. =)

And for a bit of history -- this idea started with skreech and his old
'mudbot' program which he used to connect Quake servers, IRC, and his MUD.
We thought it'd be fun to reimplement it (much better) in Twisted, so I'm
helping him out.


-- 
Chris Armstrong  |  carmstro at twistedmatrix.com  |  cjast3 at robert-morris.edu
Web Page: http://purl.org/net/ChrisArmstrong





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