> First, Twisted doesn't always use the BSD sockets API; the Windows IOCP > reactor, especially, starts off with the socket() function, but things > go off in a different direction pretty quickly from there.
Hmm. Are you saying it doesn't use listen, connect, bind, send, recv? To me, that's the core of BSD sockets. I can understand it doesn't use select(2). > So it's > perfectly fine to introduce yourself to networking via Twisted, and many > users have done just that. If you're using it idiomatically, you should > never encounter a socket object or file descriptor poking through the > API anywhere. And that's all fine. I still claim that you have to *understand* sockets in order to use it properly. By this, I mean stuff like "what is a TCP connection? how is it established?", "how is UDP different from TCP?", "when data arrives, what layers of software does it go through?", "what is a port number?", etc. > Second, it makes me a little sad that it appears to be folk wisdom that > Twisted is only for servers. A lot of work has gone into making it > equally appropriate for clients. This is especially true if your client > has a GUI, where Twisted is often better than a protocol-specific > library, which may either be blocking or have its own ad-hoc event loop. I think that's because many of the problems that Twisted solves don't exist in many of the client applications - in particular, you often don't have many simultaneous connections. GUI apps may be the interesting special case, but I expect that people dealing with these rather use separate threads. > I don't have an opinion on the socket HOWTO per se, only on the > possibility of linking to Twisted as an alternate implementation > mechanism. It really would be better to say "go use Twisted rather than > reading any of the following" than "read the following, which will help > you understand Twisted". Wouldn't you agree that Twisted is very difficult to learn, and thus much heavier than sockets? And I don't blame the Twisted API for that, but rather the mental model of overlapping activities that people have severe problems with. Regards, Martin _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
