Yesterday I had the chance to talk with Jack Moffitt and Christopher Zorn of Chesspark about their company, their vision, and how Twisted played an integral role in their application and helped them to meet their goals.
The interview is on the site and the feed is available here.
We're still experimenting with podcasting and feed enclosures, so please be patient with us! If you have any issues, the media files are available at archive.org.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Twisted Talks at PyCon 2008
There will be two Twisted-related talks at PyCon this year:
"Tahoe: A Robust Distributed Secure Filesystem" -- Brian Warner, of Twisted Foolscap fame, discusses his company's distributed file system, built on Twisted. Tahoe is free, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem. This filesystem is encrypted and spread over multiple peers in such a way that it remains available even when some of the peers are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious.
"Adventures in Stackless Python/Twisted Integration" -- Andrew Francis will be discussing the Web Service Business Process Execution Language, particularly he integrated Stackless Python and Twisted.
"Tahoe: A Robust Distributed Secure Filesystem" -- Brian Warner, of Twisted Foolscap fame, discusses his company's distributed file system, built on Twisted. Tahoe is free, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem. This filesystem is encrypted and spread over multiple peers in such a way that it remains available even when some of the peers are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious.
"Adventures in Stackless Python/Twisted Integration" -- Andrew Francis will be discussing the Web Service Business Process Execution Language, particularly he integrated Stackless Python and Twisted.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
RSS Flood Apology
Hey all,
A quick note to apologize for the RSS updates you'll be getting that are full of old news. I just finished sync'ing Twisted news to the labs blog (and tagging them with "news"). There weren't many items, so the pain of the RSS flood should be minimal. I offer apologies nonetheless :-)
The upshot of all this is that we now have a couple different RSS feeds for your viewing pleasure:
You can also view the news items in either of these three places:
A quick note to apologize for the RSS updates you'll be getting that are full of old news. I just finished sync'ing Twisted news to the labs blog (and tagging them with "news"). There weren't many items, so the pain of the RSS flood should be minimal. I offer apologies nonetheless :-)
The upshot of all this is that we now have a couple different RSS feeds for your viewing pleasure:
- Items of Twisted Interest (labs.twistedmatrix.com): http://feeds.feedburner.com/TwistedMatrixLaboratories
- News Items: http://feeds.launchpad.net/twisted/announcements.atom
You can also view the news items in either of these three places:
- http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/ArchivedNews
- https://launchpad.net/twisted/+announcements
- http://labs.twistedmatrix.com/search/label/news
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Twisted's filepath Module
Glyph recently blogged about some of the buried treasure in Twisted, the filepath module in particular. Since working at Divmod, I've made use of this module quite a bit, and thought I'd share some of the features that I've found most useful (and intuitively nice to use).
Assuming you've got Twisted installed, let's fire up a python interpreter and import the FilePath class and instantiate it with /tmp:
>>> from twisted.python.filepath import FilePath
>>> tmp = FilePath('/tmp')
Now let's test some basic operations:
>>> tmp.exists()
True
>>> bogus = tmp.child('bogus')
>>> bogus.exists()
False
Isn't that nice? I love not having to import and use the os.path.exists function; it's a method on the object representing a file or a path, as it should be. I also enjoy the convenience FilePath offers when it comes to creating paths:
>>> mydir = tmp.child('notbogus').child('anotherdir').child('mydir')
>>> mydir.exists()
False
>>> mydir.makedirs()
>>> mydir.restat()
>>> mydir.exists()
True
We had to call restat() so that the object would check the file system again (since we just made some changes). Now, for some files:
>>> for filename in ['test1.txt', 'test2.txt', 'test3.tst']:
... mydir.child(filename).touch()
...
>>> mydir.listdir()
['test1.txt', 'test2.txt', 'test3.tst']
And if you don't believe that, we can switch to shell:
lorien:oubiwann 20:51:58 $ ls -al /tmp/notbogus/anotherdir/mydir/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 oubiwann wheel 170 Feb 17 20:51 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 oubiwann wheel 102 Feb 17 20:46 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test2.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test3.tst
Reading and writing operations are the same as usual:
>>> myfile = mydir.child(filename)
>>> myfile.isdir()
False
>>> myfile.islink()
False
>>> myfile.isfile()
True
>>> fh = myfile.open('w+')
>>> fh.write('do the usual thing')
>>> fh.close()
>>> myfile.getsize()
18L
>>> myfile.open().read()
'do the usual thing'
But you can use shortcuts like this, too:
>>> myfile.getContent()
'do the usual thing'
>>> myfile.setContent('and now for somethibg completely different...')
>>> myfile.getContent()
'and now for somethibg completely different...'
Let's get the path and recheck the file size, just to make sure:
>>> myfile.path
'/tmp/notbogus/anotherdir/mydir/test3.tst'
>>> myfile.restat()
>>> myfile.getsize()
45L
Or, again from shell:
lorien:oubiwann 20:52:06 $ ls -al /tmp/notbogus/anotherdir/mydir/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 oubiwann wheel 170 Feb 17 20:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 oubiwann wheel 102 Feb 17 20:46 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test2.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 45 Feb 17 20:58 test3.tst
Hmm... for some reason, I really like this file and want to keep it. What do I do?
>>> docs = FilePath('/Users/oubiwann/Documents')
>>> myfile.moveTo(docs.child('special_file.txt'))
That's it! Nice, eh? Of course, we're careful, so we check to make sure it happened:
>>> myfile.exists()
False
>>> newfile = docs.child('special_file.txt')
>>> newfile.exists()
True
>>> newfile.path
'/Users/oubiwann/Documents/special_file.txt'
>>> newfile.getsize()
45L
>>> newfile.getContent()
'and now for somethibg completely different...'
To see more, check out the source, or at least do dir(FilePath) to see what other goodies this class has to offer, and enjoy :-)
Assuming you've got Twisted installed, let's fire up a python interpreter and import the FilePath class and instantiate it with /tmp:
>>> from twisted.python.filepath import FilePath
>>> tmp = FilePath('/tmp')
Now let's test some basic operations:
>>> tmp.exists()
True
>>> bogus = tmp.child('bogus')
>>> bogus.exists()
False
Isn't that nice? I love not having to import and use the os.path.exists function; it's a method on the object representing a file or a path, as it should be. I also enjoy the convenience FilePath offers when it comes to creating paths:
>>> mydir = tmp.child('notbogus').child('anotherdir').child('mydir')
>>> mydir.exists()
False
>>> mydir.makedirs()
>>> mydir.restat()
>>> mydir.exists()
True
We had to call restat() so that the object would check the file system again (since we just made some changes). Now, for some files:
>>> for filename in ['test1.txt', 'test2.txt', 'test3.tst']:
... mydir.child(filename).touch()
...
>>> mydir.listdir()
['test1.txt', 'test2.txt', 'test3.tst']
And if you don't believe that, we can switch to shell:
lorien:oubiwann 20:51:58 $ ls -al /tmp/notbogus/anotherdir/mydir/
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 oubiwann wheel 170 Feb 17 20:51 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 oubiwann wheel 102 Feb 17 20:46 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test2.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test3.tst
Reading and writing operations are the same as usual:
>>> myfile = mydir.child(filename)
>>> myfile.isdir()
False
>>> myfile.islink()
False
>>> myfile.isfile()
True
>>> fh = myfile.open('w+')
>>> fh.write('do the usual thing')
>>> fh.close()
>>> myfile.getsize()
18L
>>> myfile.open().read()
'do the usual thing'
But you can use shortcuts like this, too:
>>> myfile.getContent()
'do the usual thing'
>>> myfile.setContent('and now for somethibg completely different...')
>>> myfile.getContent()
'and now for somethibg completely different...'
Let's get the path and recheck the file size, just to make sure:
>>> myfile.path
'/tmp/notbogus/anotherdir/mydir/test3.tst'
>>> myfile.restat()
>>> myfile.getsize()
45L
Or, again from shell:
lorien:oubiwann 20:52:06 $ ls -al /tmp/notbogus/anotherdir/mydir/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 oubiwann wheel 170 Feb 17 20:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 oubiwann wheel 102 Feb 17 20:46 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test1.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 0 Feb 17 20:51 test2.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 oubiwann wheel 45 Feb 17 20:58 test3.tst
Hmm... for some reason, I really like this file and want to keep it. What do I do?
>>> docs = FilePath('/Users/oubiwann/Documents')
>>> myfile.moveTo(docs.child('special_file.txt'))
That's it! Nice, eh? Of course, we're careful, so we check to make sure it happened:
>>> myfile.exists()
False
>>> newfile = docs.child('special_file.txt')
>>> newfile.exists()
True
>>> newfile.path
'/Users/oubiwann/Documents/special_file.txt'
>>> newfile.getsize()
45L
>>> newfile.getContent()
'and now for somethibg completely different...'
To see more, check out the source, or at least do dir(FilePath) to see what other goodies this class has to offer, and enjoy :-)
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Simple Python Web Server
Corey Goldberg blogged about making simple web interfaces. I was going to comment with another example of a simple web server, but his blog kept spitting back errors, so I'll post it here instead.
Corey's code was based on
Of course, it requires a bit more than just the standard library. ;) This has a couple extra nice features though - it does logging, for example, and it can be trivially daemonized, or run under the profiler or the debugger, or chrooted or as a different uid/gid. Plus the Foo resource can easily be relocated into a "real" program, since it is entirely distinct from the HTTP server part of the code.
There's an even simpler way to express this though, as an rpy instead of a tac:
Just drop this into a directory and run a Twisted web server pointed at it (eg,
Corey's code was based on
BaseHTTPServer, here's another way to do this (as a Twisted tac file):
from twisted.web import server, resource
from twisted.application import internet, service
class Foo(resource.Resource):
def render(self, request):
return "hello world"
root = resource.Resource()
root.putChild("foo", Foo())
application = service.Application("Tiny Web")
internet.TCPServer(8080, server.Site(root)).setServiceParent(application)
Of course, it requires a bit more than just the standard library. ;) This has a couple extra nice features though - it does logging, for example, and it can be trivially daemonized, or run under the profiler or the debugger, or chrooted or as a different uid/gid. Plus the Foo resource can easily be relocated into a "real" program, since it is entirely distinct from the HTTP server part of the code.
There's an even simpler way to express this though, as an rpy instead of a tac:
from twisted.web.resource import Resource
class Foo(Resource):
def render(self, request):
return "hello world"
resource = Foo()
Just drop this into a directory and run a Twisted web server pointed at it (eg,
twistd web --processor rpy=twisted.web.script.ResourceScript --path bar/). You can even change the code without restarting the server if you do it this way. rpys can be convenient for one-off hacks, but clearly it's not suitable for anything larger scale than that.
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