The jobs category made it to the top of the list this time around, with folks like Rackspace hiring Knowers in the Ways of Twist. This automation engineer position puts Twisted on par with .Net and C#, giving it title space. This one is looking for talent working with custom protocols and mobile device products. Fluidinfo is also looking for some Twisted talent; if you're interested, email me and I'll put you in touch with them.
The Rackspace job posting is interesting, because a reliable source said that they are doing some very sexy stuff with Twisted and cloud computing. This would be quite the catch, job hunters...
The Fredericksburg Twist
Zope Corp recently released zc.twist 1.3, "Talking to the ZODB in Twisted Reactor Calls." Their page on PyPI has extensive documentation and some great examples. With their Zope 3 work, Zope Corp has consistently provided some of the best technical documentation I've seen in the Python world (possibly fueled by their excellent use of doctests). This release makes me want to jump back into the ZODB :-)
Related to the ZODB, be sure to read Martijn Faassen's recent post.
Compliments
Terry Jones referred to the Twisted crew nicely in his blog post, saying that the framework is "an extraordinarily good set of asynchronous networking libraries written by a set of extraordinarily young and gifted programmers." Well, we're starting to get grey hairs, bald spots, and love handles... so perhaps we're not quite as young as we used to be ;-) But we'll take the compliment anyway, Terry ;-)
Holy Fervor
Colin Alston had some interesting things to say about "religious" technology debates and managed to nicely support Twisted and Divmod's Nevow at the same time. I'm saddened when people try to debate with us about the "right way" to do network programming (right now, everyone's asking how we compare to Erlang). This isn't a jihad, folks. Colin said it very well:
Why is it though that people become so fanatical about a particular framework or language? At the end of the day our choices of language and framework should be based on merit and not on emotion.Colin also highlighted a few of the many reasons I like to use Twisted and Nevow:
Once you can break this mould, the endless possibilities of web applications become far more apparent. Twisted and Nevow gives you a clean web server tailored for your application, and you can keep your own state information and event control without needing the client to hit on special pages or abusing AJAX to poll resources.Scaling
Next up is Glyph's absolutely fantastic essay on scaling with Twisted and Mantissa. JP and I have actually been talking to him about this stuff in great detail lately, due to the messaging work that Glyph is doing. It's a delight that Glyph took the time to put his thoughts and analysis on "paper." There's too much good stuff in there to quote it; you'll have to read the whole thing.
Intermediate to Advanced
Glyph gets the spotlight again with his response to a recent critique of Twisted by a programmer who prefers to write threaded applications. This is a must-read for intermediate to advanced Twisters.
In a similar vein, folks wanting to push their Twisted skills further and do some integration would do well to read this post, which got upmodded at reddit.com last week. It covers some basic advice on creating Twisted-ready async code.
More Blog Bits
JP sketched out a quick prototype of TCP in the browser using Nevow/Athena. The PyPy team has Nevow running on PyPy now! Prasanna Gautam has a quick example of sending binary data over XML-RPC using Twisted. Jack Moffitt of Chesspark fame blogged about their new chat product (based on Twisted) called speeqe. Jack gives us another node in his earlier Firefox GTD blog post. There was a post by Duncan covering some examples of "batching" deferreds in Twisted. Glyph posted an interesting comment on Steve Holden's blog. And finally, Jonathan Lange gives a shout out to the crew on his post about code reviews.
