[Twisted-Python] TWN #6, Text version!
Chris Armstrong
carmstro at twistedmatrix.com
Wed Aug 15 11:31:50 MDT 2001
(Someone pointed out that lynx -dump produces nice text output with
references. So here's the text version of TWN #6!)
The Twisted Weekly News
6th Issue. Wednesday, August 15, 2001
QOTW:
<Inhibitor> this is commercial software - there are no security holes
<Inhibitor> not like your crappy open source - written by students - stuff
<glyph> right, I had forgotten
Welcome to the 6th issue of the Twisted Weekly News! Last week I
mentioned how much Twisted had grown in developers and users -- well,
obviously I'm not a psychic. This week has seen a much larger
growth-spurt. Rock on, Twisted!
Progress
Here's what's been happening this week in the code base.
* Twisted 0.9.5: We made another [1]release. This one was mainly bug
fixes, code cleanup, and documentation. The cool thing about this
release is that we put [2]publicly available Twisted Words and
Twisted Reality servers up on twistedmatrix.com. Get ready for a
new release, though, Twisted 0.9.6 is planned to be out soon!
* Twisted Manhole: Chris Armstrong got sick and tired of the telnet
interface to Twisted, so he wrote a nice PB service as a
replacement for it, with cooler features. The GTK+ interface
supports coloured output, command history, and editing of full
blocks of code before executing them. Glyph also helped out a lot
when he cleaned up Chris' mess of code, and made the GUI much
prettier. ;-)
* Docs: Well, people have been responding to repeated requests for
documentation. Acapnotic has been on a rampage through docstrings,
and moshez wrote a [3]page on writing low-level protocol
implementations for Twisted.
* Mail: Moshez is still working hard on twisted.mail - the latest
checkin comments show that he has implemented relaying
successfully! (So when is twistedmatrix.com going to switch to
twisted.mail? ;-))
* Twisted.Words: There's a lot of interest in this little package
lately: the IRC interface is becoming more robust, and the
InstanceMessenger client has been getting a lot better (there is
now a Tk version, too).
* utilities: Moshez hacked a little on the utility scripts included
with Twisted -- he made a neato utility for generating
policy-conformant Debian packages, added a --python parameter to
twistd for reading from plain python files instead of .taps, and
added --append to mktap, which adds another server to an existing
twisted application. from tap files.
* Twisted TOC: z3p's been hacking more on Twisted TOC. He made a
client for it, but unfortunately had to pull it due to a nasty
copyright on some widget library he was using. Instead of creating
a separate client, z3p now plans on adding TOC support to Instance
Messenger (right, z3p? ;-))
* Twisted SSL: Itamar implemented a really cool SSL layer for
Twisted. All that is required to use it is to basically change one
line of code in the typical Twisted server. This will be really
cool for manhole, so passwords and code will be able to be
encrypted. Thanks a lot Itamar, we've had lots of requests for SSL
support. :-)
Other Stuff
Here are summaries of some of the more significant mailing list
threads.
Moshe [4]suggested refactoring the daemonize() function into a
separate module, only to start somewhat of a holy war with glyph which
later moved to IRC. I can't really explain why glyph was against it
myself, but I know it had something to do with philosophy. ;-)
Kevin Turner made a very confusing [5]attempt at proposing a new
"Multiplexing" feature for Perspective Broker. The gist of it was that
there can be an object shared between many hosts, and whenever the
object is updated by anyone, the changes propagate to everyone else.
The discussion must've been half on IRC, though, because I couldn't
really make out what the conclusion was. It seems that what Acapnotic
wants is in the Cached class..
Itamar had [6]Some suggestions for Twisted after he read a lot of the
source while he was on a plane trip. He thought that 0) Twisted was
cool, 1) Pickling on server shutdown should be optional (he has
servers which aren't pickleable), 2) number of clients which
socket.listen() queues shouldn't be hard-coded to 5, 3) threadable
servers should be faster, and 4) more docstrings should be put in.
Moshe Zadka replied that Most of these things had been solved or are
being worked on. The thread quickly changed topic to one about
[7]threading, and Itamar [8]implementing some more threading
capabilities for Twisted.
Cool Thing Of the Week:
Twisted Enterprise
Twisted Enterprise is the new database interface for Twisted, written
by Sean Riley. This was an especially interesting problem, because
most (all?) database servers are blocking beasts, so servers talking
to it must be multi-threaded. The Twisted solution was to have a
separate multi-threaded Twisted process which talks to the database in
the background and listens and answers for requests from other (thread
or not) Twisted processes. This way you do not have to deal with
threads in your own application if you don't want to, even if you want
it to talk to a database.
Enterprise is going to be a big thing in Twisted -- Glyph is working
on a great authentication system that uses this new package. Get ready
for enterprise b2b internet solution!!
Plea for help from the pathetic editor
I've been very busy lately, and I haven't even started school yet. So,
I'll probably be even more busy very soon -- If anyone is willing to
help me out with TWN on a weekly basis (maybe only half an hour every
week) It would be *incredibly* helpful. The two areas where I need it
the most are the mailing list summaries and the conversion to text
format for the mailing list (if you know of some software that will do
this and nicely generate references for links at the bottom, that'd
help *tons*). But even if you can just summarise a new feature in
Twisted, it'd still help. Thanks!
Ok, that's it for this week. Thanks for reading!
[9]Chris Armstrong
References
1. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/downloads/
2. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/users/pb.twistd
3. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/page.epy/docs/writing-serves.html
4. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2001-August/000199.html
5. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2001-August/000203.html
6. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2001-August/000228.html
7. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2001-August/000240.html
8. http://www.twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2001-August/000231.html
9. mailto:carmstro at twistedmatrix.com
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