[Twisted-Python] Freevo 2.0, Kamaelia, pyevent, Eventnet/LGT: what's going on?

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le jeudi 20 octobre 2005 à 09:55 +0200, Nicola Larosa a écrit :
> One year ago the Freevo project, for its 2.0 rewrite, dropped Twisted, and
> then went and reimplemented something similar. Then there are Kamaelia,
> pyevent, and EventNet inside LGT.
> 
> Why isn't Twisted seen, by these projects at least, as a viable tool?

I don't know. FWIW, my current opinion about Twisted (may change without
warning ;-)) is that:
- all traditional network functions are quite clear, easy to use and
stable
- high-level features seem better avoided since documentation is often
very lacking and the API does not seem stable
- design choices are not documented at all (for example, why a custom
logging module instead of the Python-provided one?), so they often look
gratuitous
- the tendency to advocate proprietary protocols (like PB) without
warning the user should be mitigated
- the architecture is sometimes bizarre or badly described (the
credential stuff looks like Chinese to me); for example, why is there a
distinction between "*Protocol" and "*Factory" types?

I often recommend the use of Twisted for standard network functions. But
I stay away of the more sophisticated stuff (including twistd, PB,
Nevow, etc.). Grouping all this stuff together with the basic, trusted,
dependable network classes may yield a perception of twisted as
bloatware.


(OTOH, I very briefly looked at Kamaelia's introduction doc and I don't
find it attractive - this kind of dataflow-programming model looks quite
unflexible)

Regards

Antoine.