[Twisted-Python] TWN issue #1!

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Chris Armstrong wrote:

> * The TwistedPython Weekly News *
> 1st Issue. Monday, July 2, 2001

A round of applause for Chris putting together such a nice review!  I
think this is a great idea and I look forward to seeing more of these in
the future.

> * Name Change: There has been talk of a name change. The name "Twisted Python"
>   is definitely going, as it can mislead people to believe that it's some sort
>   of distribution of Python (Most Python ports/distributions are "Something
>   Python"). Two ideas so far are just "Twisted" or "TwistedMatrix".

I think I like "Twisted".  An adjective name gives us a couple of things;
like natural sounding submodules (as is appropriate for an all-inclusive
project such as this one).  Also, it seems to be the de-facto name
already; people refer to 'twisted' on #python IRC all the time.

> Watch out for some cool new things coming to TwistedPython.
> 
> * Chris is working on a spell-casting system for Twisted Reality.
> * Jason Asbahr will be working on InstanceMessenger, a new messaging system
>   based on the new PerspectiveBroker.
> * Watch out for twisted.pim. Glyph is getting an Agenda VR3 soon and he wants
>   Twisted Python running on it. :)

Unfortunately my VR3 seems very late and the agenda computing folks have
been uncommunicative.

> * Interesting Thing Of the Week:
> * The Twisted PerspectiveBroker
> 
> After much mucking about, Glyph finally refactored ProxyBroker into
> PerspectiveBroker. This is probably the most exciting new development for
> Twisted Python in recent time. pb is a replacement for Gloop, which mainly uses
> cPickle for serialization of objects. pb, on the other hand, uses 'jelly', a
> home-made serialization library which uses S-Expressions. This is going to be a
> very central part of TPy, and we're all very excited about it. Go Glyph!

Sorry to contradict you so soon after the news, but it's no longer based
on s-expressions! :)

Perspective Broker is a tiered protocol; at the lowest tier is
twisted.glen, the Generic List Encoder.  Glen is a pretty interesting
accomplishment in itself, but it hides its details pretty well -- all that
PerspectiveBroker deals with is lists of strings/ints/floats.  So,
currently glen is almost completely isomorhpic to sexps, but is much
faster to generate, faster to parse, and *MUCH* smaller in terms of data
transmission size, especially for protocols like pb (like, an order of
magnitude).  There is currently somewhat of a CPU bottleneck in
ListEncoding.dataReceived, but I believe this function will not be
difficult to rewrite in c When The Time Comes To Optimize.

Those of you who have Twisted websites on twistedmatrix.com, there will be
a bit of a "red flag day" this sunday.  We're going to be switching from
the old Gloop-based distributed websites to a newer, shinier, altogether
less totally sucky PB-based distributed web system.  The short version is
that this will cause your dynamic websites to not function with the new
server.  (I hope to release 0.9.0 before then, so it'll be on the website
before the web server itself is upgraded.)

It should be a simple process of regenerating your SPL in order to use the
new code, assuming that Chris refactored web properly :)

                      ______      __   __  _____  _     _
                     |  ____ |      \_/   |_____] |_____|
                     |_____| |_____  |    |       |     |
                     @ t w i s t e d m a t r i x  . c o m
                     http://twistedmatrix.com/users/glyph