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

[Johann Borck]

I feel like i have to make a statement ...
i've started to use twisted looking for alternatives to zope, and what i
found was the most exciting piece of art in source i ever had the honour
to be able to read. i don't know if i missed something, but to me there
seems to be nothing comparable. it's not the very easiest to understand
and get into, but i'm more than just glad that in almost any cases the
hard work has been done already when i decide to implement something
network-related, and am able to focus on what i want to do, not on how
and if it might be done.  since the existence of PB the question how to
get things working together over some distance, to me, is just answered 
- nothing is as straight and direct to the point, it's even hard for me
to think of something better, it's sad not to be a native speaker, i'd
like to find words matching it's elegance. and there's one more thing
about twisted, that's invaluable, the learning experience. if someone is
interested in network-programming, she can use C or Java or whatever,
and there's always the choice between high abstraction and low-level,
the choice between take what this or that can do for you, and do it
yourself from scratch. twisted gives the learner insight about the
low-level stuff while providing layers of abstraction up to the point,
where the only thing left to do is implementing the specific application
logic. just by reading twisted one can learn so much about
network-programming, from raw sockets over these incredible amounts of
protocols up to, name it, it get's absolutely countless taking divmod's
stuff into account. it's perfectly readable compared to anything i know,
even with some significant lack of documentation. to me it's a
revolution, the most ambitious, thoughtful, invaluable, let me say
beautiful project and way to get this world connected. twisted is
serious fun.
i always feel if only some more people knew about it (documentation),
people who decide about what framework to use for their large project,
twisted had to take off, python had to take its deserved place and so
on. twisted today is an import from future, if reason gets it's way..

regards and many thanks, Johann


Nicola Larosa wrote:

>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? Is
>the event-driven Python world undergoing the same fragmentation as the web
>framework one?
>
>
>"Freevo is an open-source home theatre PC platform based on Linux and a
>number of open-source audio/video tools."
>
>http://freevo.sourceforge.net/about.html
>
>"CurrentStatus
>
>For Freevo 2.0 we changed many parts of the code...
>
>Changes
>
>* Changed the main loop to use PyNotifier. No threads are allowed anymore
>and every part must take care that the notifier loop is kept alive. Not all
>parts respect that right now.
>
>* Removed Twisted. It is a huge monster and hard to understand. For
>inter-process communication a python implementation (PyMbus) of the Mbus
>transport protocol is used. As a side effect, modules using twisted need to
>be rewritten."
>
>http://freevo.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/freevo-2.0/CurrentStatus
>
>The reasons for the switch are outlined in this mailing list thread:
>
>switching to pynotifier and pymbus
>http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5523105&forum_id=9200
>
>Kamaelia
>http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/
>
>pyevent
>http://monkey.org/~dugsong/pyevent/
>
>EventNet - LGT
>http://lgt.berlios.de/#eventnet
>
>  
>