[Twisted-Python] IBM developer works

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Wednesday, August 20, 2003, at 05:54 AM, Richard Johannesson wrote:

> Is there a good article on how to use Twisted for doing
> web applications for instance? Is Twisted / Woven a good
> way to go for web applications?

This article is not particularly bad, as far as that goes; (aside from 
the minor gaffe of defining a class in an RPY file which is mislabeled 
".py") I think it's unfair to say it's "like PHP".  That said, the 
article is about writing a web application, and Twisted works best when 
you reconfigure the sub-atomic particles in your brain to completely 
disassociate the concepts of "web" and "application".

Woven encourages you to develop a completely separate, 
separately-testable abstraction of your application, then wrap that 
with web-specific code.  David's article is just showing you the 
web-specific code part of that, and his "application objects" are lists 
of dictionaries of strings; nothing too sophisticated.

The trouble with documenting such a system is that it's geared towards 
doing non-trivial things.  If your example is non-trivial, then you can 
get carried away with explaining the example rather than explaining 
what the example is supposed to demonstrate.  If it's trivial, then you 
end up with abbreviated versions of things which are intended for more 
sophisticated use-cases, and so they don't always make sense.

For what it's worth, I think David's articles are doing a good job of 
finding that balance.  I'm sure that we'll need a lot more 
documentation before it's clear, though.

Maybe this should be Twisted's motto: "Making theoretically impossible 
things easy, and easy things theoretically possible."