[Twisted-Python] Documentation

Shandy Brown shandy at geeky.net
Fri Feb 8 02:23:58 MST 2002


Hi.

Glyph invited me to share my thoughts about the state of Twisted
Documentation, and why I chose not to use Twisted in my project,
Metagame-Sector ( http://sjbrown.geeky.net/metagame-sector/ ).  I guess
the best way to explain why I didn't choose Twisted is to look at what I
did choose, SimpleXMLRPCServer (
http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/simple-xmlrpc-servers.html ).

My project and my attitudes are such that I don't want to spend a lot of
time on client-server implementation.  I already  had a working
'standalone' implementation, and I wanted to add on the client-server
"Feature".  And for this, XMLRPCServer was great.  To make my Game
object listen for requests on the internet, all i had to do was call
register_instance( myGame )  (ok, it was a little more complicated than
that -- i had to resolve threading and pickling issues, but that got me
started )  I was able to read this article:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/81549

and the SimpleXMLRPCServer docs linked above, and I was good to go. 
Some say a picture is worth a thousand words;  When learning APIs, an
example (as above) is worth a thousand help()s.

In comparison, Twisted offerred me this as documentation:

http://www.twistedmatrix.com/page.epy/docs/writing-servers.html

In a *subjective* nutshell, this is hard to read.  Also, coming from my
background, it doesn't tell me how do do what I want to do, which is:
extend my already existing class to make it listen to the internet for
requests.  An ***example*** would really help out here.

Hope this helps let you understand one outsider's view of the
documentation.

sjbrown


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