Hi, I'd like to come to grips with Twisted, and so far I've been following and tweaking example after example. But I'm finding it incredibly hard to get a high level view of the Twisted "landscape" — and because I don't know what I don't know, it's hard to know what questions to even ask. I want to get to the point where I can just sit down and know where to start, and hopefully someone here can give me a bit of direction.
I understand many of the microscopic components. Deferred results, file descriptors and sockets, the reactor loop concept — I get those. I've read the tutorial[1], another Twisted Introduction[2], and about 50% of the API documentation (possibly not the right 50%, though). But I just can't seem to wrap my head around the interfaces, factories and wiring it all together. Maybe some examples of the speedbumps I keep encountering will help: 1. The "finger" intro "Drop Connections" example[3] just straight out uses the self.transport member of a protocol. But how do I, a Twisted newbie, know that this even exists? After hours of digging around, I find it in the docs for a BaseProtocol method[4]. Later on, this same example uses the "self.factory" member. I still haven't found that one. Where do I look up these assumed-to-exist members? How do I know what other members exist? 2. What is a Factory, anyway? What are they *for*? 3. The finger example goes over writing a server — what about an asynchronous client that must follow a particular protocol? Where do I start with that? Is there an example? 4. What if I'm not interested in networking? I primarily deal with serial lines, files and subprocesses... are there examples for those? Points #3 and #4 are my motivation for using Twisted — I am currently mired in a pygtk program that uses threads and all sorts of locks and synchronisation mechanisms to send and receive data over a serial line, updating UI with progress, errors and success. I'd like to see if using Twisted simplifies things a bit, and I'll ask a more specific question about how to structure that when I can condense it to a reasonable level :) I hope I'm not being too vague, but Twisted is rather large, conceptually, to absorb. I keep being pointed to the documentation for specific parts, but I have no idea how they fit together and that's what I'm really after. Thanks, Jason [1] http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/tutorial/index.html [2] http://krondo.com/?page_id=1327 [3] http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/tutorial/intro.html#auto4 [4] http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/api/twisted.internet.protocol.BaseProtocol.html#makeConnection _______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python
