Choosing a Reactor and GUI Toolkit Integration

  1. Overview
  2. Reactor Functionality
  3. General Purpose Reactors
  4. Platform-Specific Reactors
  5. GUI Integration Reactors
  6. Non-Reactor GUI Integration

Overview

Twisted provides a variety of implementations of the twisted.internet.reactor. The specialized implementations are suited for different purposes and are designed to integrate better with particular platforms.

The select()-based reactor is Twisted's cross-platform reactor.

Platform-specific reactor implementations exist for:

The remaining custom reactor implementations provide support for integrating with the native event loops of various graphical toolkits. This lets your Twisted application use all of the usual Twisted APIs while still being a graphical application.

Twisted currently integrates with the following graphical toolkits:

When using applications that are runnable using twistd, e.g. TACs or plugins, there is no need to choose a reactor explicitly, since this can be chosen using twistd's -r option.

In all cases, the event loop is started by calling reactor.run(). In all cases, the event loop should be stopped with reactor.stop().

IMPORTANT: installing a reactor should be the first thing done in the app, since any code that does from twisted.internet import reactor will automatically install the default reactor if the code hasn't already installed one.

Reactor Functionality

StatusTCPSSLUDPThreadingProcessesSchedulingPlatforms
select()StableYYYYYYUnix, Win32
pollStableYYYYYYUnix
WaitForMultipleObjects (WFMO) for Win32ExperimentalYYYYYYWin32
Input/Output Completion Port (IOCP) for Win32ExperimentalYYNNNYWin32
CoreFoundationUnmaintainedYYYYYYMac OS X
epollStableYYYYYYLinux 2.6
GTK+StableYYYYYYUnix, Win32
wxExperimentalYYYYYYUnix, Win32
kqueueExperimentalYYYYYYFreeBSD

General Purpose Reactors

Select()-based Reactor

The select reactor is currently the default reactor on all platforms. The following code will install it, if no other reactor has been installed:

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from twisted.internet import reactor

In the future, if another reactor becomes the default, but the select reactor is desired, it may be installed via:

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from twisted.internet import selectreactor selectreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

Platform-Specific Reactors

Poll-based Reactor

The PollReactor will work on any platform that provides poll() (while Mac OS X provides poll(), it is not recommended to use the PollReactor on Mac OS X due to bugs in its implementation of the call). With larger numbers of connected sockets, it may provide for better performance than the SelectReactor.

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from twisted.internet import pollreactor pollreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

KQueue

The KQueue Reactor allows Twisted to use FreeBSD's kqueue mechanism for event scheduling. See instructions in the twisted.internet.kqreactor's docstring for installation notes.

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from twisted.internet import kqreactor kqreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

WaitForMultipleObjects (WFMO) for Win32

The Win32 reactor is not yet complete and has various limitations and issues that need to be addressed. The reactor supports GUI integration with the win32gui module, so it can be used for native Win32 GUI applications.

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from twisted.internet import win32eventreactor win32eventreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

Input/Output Completion Port (IOCP) for Win32

Windows provides a fast, scalable event notification system known as IO Completion Ports, or IOCP for short. Twisted includes a reactor based on IOCP which is nearly complete. The reactor has a handful of known bugs and lacks SSL support.

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from twisted.internet import iocpreactor iocpreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

Epoll-based Reactor

The EPollReactor will work on any platform that provides epoll, today only Linux 2.6 and over. The implementation of the epoll reactor currently uses the Level Triggered interface, which is basically like poll() but scales much better.

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from twisted.internet import epollreactor epollreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

GUI Integration Reactors

GTK+

Twisted integrates with PyGTK version 2.0 using the gtk2reactor. An example Twisted application that uses GTK+ can be found in doc/core/examples/pbgtk2.py.

GTK-2.0 split the event loop out of the GUI toolkit and into a separate module called glib. To run an application using the glib event loop, use the glib2reactor. This will be slightly faster than gtk2reactor (and does not require a working X display), but cannot be used to run GUI applications.

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from twisted.internet import gtk2reactor # for gtk-2.0 gtk2reactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

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from twisted.internet import glib2reactor # for non-GUI apps glib2reactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

wxPython

Twisted currently supports two methods of integrating wxPython. Unfortunately, neither method will work on all wxPython platforms (such as GTK2 or Windows). It seems that the only portable way to integrate with wxPython is to run it in a separate thread. One of these methods may be sufficient if your wx app is limited to a single platform.

As with Tkinter, the support for integrating Twisted with a wxPython application uses specialized support code rather than a simple reactor.

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from wxPython.wx import * from twisted.internet import wxsupport, reactor myWxAppInstance = wxApp(0) wxsupport.install(myWxAppInstance)

However, this has issues when running on Windows, so Twisted now comes with alternative wxPython support using a reactor. Using this method is probably better. Initialization is done in two stages. In the first, the reactor is installed:

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from twisted.internet import wxreactor wxreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

Later, once a wxApp instance has been created, but before reactor.run() is called:

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from twisted.internet import reactor myWxAppInstance = wxApp(0) reactor.registerWxApp(myWxAppInstance)

An example Twisted application that uses wxPython can be found in doc/core/examples/wxdemo.py.

CoreFoundation

Twisted integrates with PyObjC version 1.0. Sample applications using Cocoa and Twisted are available in the examples directory under doc/core/examples/threadedselect/Cocoa.

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from twisted.internet import cfreactor cfreactor.install() from twisted.internet import reactor

Non-Reactor GUI Integration

Tkinter

The support for Tkinter doesn't use a specialized reactor. Instead, there is some specialized support code:

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from Tkinter import * from twisted.internet import tksupport, reactor root = Tk() # Install the Reactor support tksupport.install(root) # at this point build Tk app as usual using the root object, # and start the program with "reactor.run()", and stop it # with "reactor.stop()".

PyUI

As with Tkinter, the support for integrating Twisted with a PyUI application uses specialized support code rather than a simple reactor.

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from twisted.internet import pyuisupport, reactor pyuisupport.install(args=(640, 480), kw={'renderer': 'gl'})

An example Twisted application that uses PyUI can be found in doc/core/examples/pyuidemo.py.

Index

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