[Twisted-Python] Server with several outgoing connections

[Roland Hedberg]

Hi!

I'm new to Twisted and I have tried to read and understand the 
intricate sides of it.
And have found as so many other that the learning curve pretty steep, 
especially I guess if one comes from being a C programmer :-)

Anyway, this is my problem:

I'm building a system that consists of a number of nodes, each node 
acting as a receiver and transmitter of messages. The protocol used 
between the nodes might be a message passing system like xmpp or 
something else. The number of nodes are dynamic and might change at any 
time. Plus there is no way by which you can know when the system is 
started how many nodes there will be. Also nodes might receive messages 
from any number of nodes and be expected to transmit the messages to 
several nodes.

Writing the 'server' part of a node is easy, plenty of examples of that 
exists on the net.

Writing the 'client' side is not so easy and here I guess my C legacy 
is hampering me.

So I'd like someone to give me, or point me, to an example on how to 
dynamically create new connections to receivers. I first though these 
connections should be shortlived that is 'open the connection, send the 
message, receive the ACK and close the connection' but now I think it 
might be wiser to keep the connections as long as possible. That is, 
until that receiver disappears.

Another side of this is that the influx of messages might be higher 
than the possible output, that is each node has to keep queues for 
messages not yet sent and messages sent but not ack'ed.
It might also happen that recivers of messages are not accessible in 
which case the message has to be queue until the receiver pops up 
again. The system is not allowed to drop messages.
Note, that each incomming message might have several receivers, so one 
incomming message might end up in the sendqueue of several receivers.

And here in lies one of the problems, I guess I have to keep a 
'centrally' managed queue, that should then be notified on the change 
of status of a message on route to a recevier. How should I implement 
this ?

--Roland