[Twisted-Python] Twisted is confusing...but I'm not giving up yet!

[Mukhsein Johari]

Hello everyone,

I'm new here. I thought trying to use zope in 1.x days was confusing but 
boy...twisted is realy out there. I can serve static web pages and do some 
cgi stuff but I'm more interested in making web-applications, primarily.

The thing is, from the docs I've read (and that's pretty much all in the 
distro) I'm still confused about what goes where and what to use. It seems 
the Twisted Framework can be used for just about anything except make coffee!

I think there-in lies the "problem". It's overwhelming for the new user. It 
would be nice if I could make a step-by-step tutorial. And I _will_ -  if 
only I can understand it first. When I first got the "hang" of zope, I made a 
tutorial that takes the user from zero to a functioning publicly postable 
job-board with searching facilities. It illustrated zopes potential to a 
newbie using some basic components (custom zclasses).

I'd like to make a similar tutorial for Twisted. If I can hack it, that is...

Basically, I'd have a bunch of classes, each has a "view" method ("display()" 
in Twisted?) and some other methods that would implement some kind of set and 
get functionality to the objects. (I have no idea how to do "searching" in 
Twisted at all). Btw...how do I implement persistence? 

I have a job-board instance that contains multiple job-posting instances. So 
that when you call the job-board's "view", it iterates over the job-posting 
instances there-in and calls their individual "view" methods. The job-board's 
"view" method creates a skeleton where the individual job-posting instances' 
"view" method "slots in".

In zope, I used zclasses to implement it (the tutorial was a zclass tutorial). 
So ZODB pretty much took care of persistence automatically for me. How do I 
do object persistence in Twisted? 

Also...what is "coil"? And how do I use it? It seems to have the same sorta 
modules that is in twisted.tap but I can't figure it out. From the 
literature, I think coil (or is it plugin?) is Twisted's way of doing zope's 
"python-based Products". Am I wrong?

Is there an analogous thingamajig to zope's zodb in Twisted?

-- 
Still-dazed-after-3-days-of-reading-Twisted-code-and-docs,
Mukhsein Johari