Saturday, May 26, 2012

Twisted 12.1.0pre1

Thanks to the efforts of Thomas Hervé, Twisted 12.1.0pre1 pre-release is now available for testing.You can find the tarballs here:
http://people.canonical.com/~therve/Twisted/12.1.0pre1/
Among the 106 tickets closed since our last release, you can find:

  • The revival of the kqueue reactor for BSD platforms.
  • epoll is now the default reactor under Linux after a fix to handle files on stdin/stdout.
  • New reactors supporting GTK3 and GObject-Introspection.
  • Several enhancements regarding file descriptors passing: systemd support for servers, ability to send and receive file descriptors across Unix sockets, and an AMP argument using that feature.
  • Support for IPv6 literals in connectTCP.
  • Persistent connections support for the new HTTP client.
This will be the last release supporting Python 2.5. Please give it a round of tests to help make a great release!

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Congratulations and welcome to Twisted's summer interns


Twisted is excited to be supporting 4 full-time summer interns from around the world through 2 internship programs this summer.

Google Summer of Code internships

Expanded Endpoints Support, by Ashwini Oruganti (IRC nick ashfall)


Ashwini joins us from the Manipal Institute of Technology in Manipal, India. She has already worked on and closed out a number of Twisted tickets and has previously contributed to Evolution and Sugar Labs.

Her project:

Recently, two new APIs, IStreamServerEndpoint and IStreamClientEndpoint were added to Twisted, for specifying what address the servers should listen for connections and what address a client should connect to, respectively. But not all of the addresses that Twisted supports have this endpoint support added to them; presently endpoint support has been implemented for TCP, SSL and UNIX domain sockets. My project deals with adding more endpoint implementation to Twisted, some involving wrappers around the existing APIs (e.g. serial ports, standard I/O), others involving making fresh APIs where setting up connections was difficult before the addition of the endpoints (e.g. SOCKS and HTTPS proxies).

Python 3 preparation, by Vladimir Perić (IRC nick vperic)


Vladimir joins us from Czech Technical University in Prague. Last year he was a Google Summer of Code student with SymPy.

His project:

Python 3 is the future of Python. If Twisted is to see continued usage in the future, it will have to be ported, and rather sooner than later. As Twisted is a large and complicated code-base, this process needs to be done with care, ensuring that any code written remains compatible with the currently supported versions. The test-driven development methodology Twisted uses will ensure no regressions happen and will ease the maintenance of the code-base.

Automatic Coding Standard Enforcement, by Raphael Shu (IRC nick zomux)


Raphael joins us from Tsukuba University in Japan, where he uses Python daily in his NLP research.

His project:

Twisted applies certain naming and style standards to all contributed code. Currently, a human reviewer needs to check all of these things. The purpose of this project is to develop a tool which can automatically make these simple, mechanical checks, freeing up human reviewer time to focus on more important aspects of proposed changes. Finally, it will speed up the review process.

Software Freedom Conservancy / GNOME Outreach Program internship

We are also excited to be working with the Software Freedom Conservancy and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women this summer. You can read more about the initiative and our work to encourage diverse participation in open source communities here. Through this initiative we have a 4th paid, full-time internship this summer:

Improving Twisted Mail and Twisted Core, by Fei Tan (IRC nick argonemyth)


Fei joins us from Grand Bay, Mauritius, where she works as a freelance web developer.

She will improve Twisted Mail on a number of fronts, including improving API documentation, adding more examples, adding more HOWTOs, and improved test coverage.

Please join me in welcoming Ashwini, Vladimir, Raphael, and Fei, whose internships start next week. Expect a torrent of code reviews and some record-breaking high scores list stats this summer!

Thank you Google for giving us this paid mentorship opportunity, and thank you to the Python Software Foundation for supporting us as our Google Summer of Code umbrella organization.