[Twisted-Python] web vs web2 clarification

James Y Knight foom at fuhm.net
Thu Dec 10 18:36:10 EST 2009


On Dec 10, 2009, at 5:29 PM, Mikhail Terekhov wrote:
> That is all true but it is very close to Joel's reasoning, kind of a manager's point of view. It is too business/money oriented and doesn't exhaust all the reasons why people write software in open source world in particular. And what is more important it doesn't explain why they still rewrite it from scratch sometimes and succeed? ;)
> 
> But this became completely unrelated to this list, sorry for dragging discussion so far.

I started the rewrite because I wanted to, and believed it was the most reasonable way to achive the goal of a better HTTP implementation and API. And let's not even call it "rewrite from scratch": it was branched from the twisted.web code and used ideas previosuly explored in Nevow. And there is even backwards compatibility in there for old twisted.web.Resource classes, which worked fine for most resources (but is not absolutely 100% compatible).

There were certainly some issues, both with functionality and with compatibility. (Especially with Nevow: Nevow is basically its own reimplementation of half of twisted.web, so the twisted.web2 backwards-compat code needed special-casing to work with it, and that was never completed). But where the project really went wrong is when I stopped working on it, and nobody else was interested in finishing that job. There were many reasons I stopped working on it, but I don't really want to get into it. The people actually doing the work now want to keep working within the old framework. And that's the open source way: he who does the work calls the shots. Tada.

I do think twisted.web2 could have succeeded in a form substantially similar to its present state, but alas, it was not meant to be.

James




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