Twisted 11.0.0pre1 released -- please test

Intrepid Twisted developers and users: from Cambridge, Massachusetts I am pleased to announce the arrival of Twisted 11.0.0 pre-release 1.

Please download the pre-release tarballs and test away!

Highlights include:

• a new templating system in Twisted Web, "twisted.web.template", derived from Divmod Nevow.
• improved behavior of subprocess spawning on FreeBSD.
• the 'twistd mail' plugin now uses the endpoints API, providing a more consistent command line and compatibility with endpoint plugins.
• twisted.plugin no longer emits a confusing traceback when it can't write a cache file.

For more information, see the NEWS file.

Super Late February Twisted Sprint Report

Good news everyone,

Last month, Twisted held another very successful sprint.  A late write-up is better than no write-up, so here's what went on.

In attendance were Glyph, Tenth, Itamar, Mike Handverger, Luke, and myself (Jean-Paul).  Remotely, Jonathan J. and Stephen Thorne helped out.  Quite a few tickets were worked on, and various reviews were done as well.  Here's a list (bold indicates now closed):

#2036 - trial runs tests from .pyc files even if there is no .py file
#3834 - TCP client howto missing reactor.run() in one code sample#3844 - Parse IRC format codes
#3948 - wxdemo.py does not exit
#4008 - Most examples in documentation do not log messages and errors
#4520 - pb.CopiedFailure.throwExceptionIntoGenerator breaks in Python 2.6.
#4817 - IPv4Address and UNIXAddress not-equal comparison is broken
#4823 - Clock should re-sort pending calls when one of them is reset
#4836 - Make _getFunction method public in t.w.xmlrpc.XMLRPC
#4864 - Improve lore2sphinx buildbot results for `projects/core/howto/logging.xhtml`
 #4865 - Improve lore2sphinx buildbot results for `projects/core/howto/quotes.xhtml`

As I'm writing up this report at the March Twisted Sprint, look forward to another one of these real soon now. :)

Unclaimed PayPal donations

Hello Twisted supporters,

If you recently tried to donate money to the Twisted Software Foundation using PayPal, then you might find that your donation has gone "unclaimed".  This is due to an unfortunate mixup in our PayPal address.  If you have a donation in this state, you should cancel it; we have no way to claim it.

If you'd like to donate, use the PayPal form on http://twistedmatrix.com/. We've updated it so future donations will go to the right place.  If you'd rather use Google Checkout, the form for donating with that service is also still available in the same place.

January Twisted Sprint Report

Our highly productive Sunday Somerville sprint was attended by glyph, cyli, tpratt, tenth, itamar, mesozoic and myself (exarkun).  Also sprinting remotely were thijs, spiv, and magcius.  All told, we closed twelve tickets:

#3372 deprecate --extra option to trial

#3412 Include link to IMAP Server Tester in Twisted IMAP documentation

#4042 [Documentation] It is too hard to figure out how to do trivial common-case sending email with twisted.mail

#4054 Delete all of the out-of-date mumbo jumbo from the "im" howto

#4438 Declare dependencies explicitly when we add them

#4491 Release Twisted 10.0.1

#4547 Remove deprecated twisted.protocols.loopback.loopback

#4712 Missing bits of statinfo accessors in FilePath

#4738 ckeygen man page has wrong summary and synopsis

#4740 Use strcred for `twistd mail` authentication options

#4773 The core howto index should link to the endpoints howto

#4786 twcgi duplicate header

More tickets were also worked on and reviewed but not quite yet ready to close:

#4317 twisted.web.http.Request allows you to write to a finished request.
#3896 Passing a unicode object to request.write corrupts the entire response
#4796 twistd mail plugin esmtp problem
#4760 HTTPPageGetter shouldn't make two requests with an afterFoundGet
#4632 ability to cascade canceling inlineCallbacks's deferred
#3077 twistd --help plugin list isn't alphabetized

There was also a lively discussion about plans for the future support of Twisted on Windows.  If you're interested in Windows networking, keep an eye out for an upcoming announcement on that topic!

Once again we were lucky enough to have tenth host the sprint, so in addition to shelter from the frozen terrorscape scant meters away, sprinters also enjoyed delicious fresh baked bread and other tasty morsels.

If you couldn't make it to this sprint, watch for an announcement of the next one sometime soon.  Or join us at PyCon for as many as four days of Twisted hacking!

Making chat hipper with Twisted!

HipChat has been changing what it means to communicate in teams of any size and taking the world by storm over the past 12 months. What you may not know is that Twisted is at the core of HipChat's highly successful service:

HipChat is a hosted group chat and IM service for businesses which uses the XMPP protocol behind the scenes. We use Twisted to power our fully clustered chat server and run many important job queue workers.

Bottom line: we built and launched a successful business on Twisted & Python in 6 months with no prior knowledge of either. It's a very productive environment with great performance and maintainability. What more could you want?

    – Garret Heaton, Co-founder, HipChat

To learn more about how HipChat uses Twisted check out the success story!

Twisted 10.2.0 Released!

Twisted 10.2.0, the third Twisted release of 2010, has emerged from the mysterious depths of Twisted Matrix Labs, as so many releases before it. Survivors of the release process - what few there were of them - have been heard to claim that this version is "awesome", "even more robust", "fun-sized" and "oven fresh".

Crossing several things that shouldn't ought to be, including the streams and the rubicon, I have assumed the triple responsibilities of feature author, project leader, and release manager for 10.2: with this dark and terrible power - a power which no man ought to wield alone - I have wrought a release which contains many exciting new features, including:

• A plug-in API for adding new types of endpoint descriptions.
• A new, simpler, substantially more robust CoreFoundation reactor.
• Improvements to the implementation of Deferred which should both improve performance and fix certain runtime errors with long callback chains.
• Deferred.setTimeout is (finally) gone.  To quote the author of this change: "A new era of peace has started."
• NetstringReceiver is substantially faster.

And, of course, nearly one hundred smaller bug fixes, documentation updates, and general improvements. See the NEWS file included in the release for more details.

Look upon our Twisted, ye mighty, and make your network applications event-driven: get it now, from:
   <http://twistedmatrix.com/>
... or simply install the 'Twisted' package from PyPI.

Many thanks to Christopher Armstrong, for his work on release-automation tools that made this possible; to Jonathan Lange, for thoroughly documenting the process and thereby making my ascent to the throne of release manager possible, and to Jean-Paul Calderone for his tireless maintenance of our build and test infrastructure as well as his help with the release.

Most of all, thanks to everyone who contributed a patch, reported a bug or reviewed a ticket for 10.2.  Not including those already thanked, there are 41 of you, so it would be a bit tedious to go through everyone, but you know who you are and we absolutely couldn't do it without you!  Thanks a ton!

Fluidinfo sponsors Twisted!

Fluidinfo is Twisted's latest sponsor!  We asked if they could share some of the joys of sponsorship with us, and they had this to say about it:

At Fluidinfo, we're heavy users of Twisted. All of our infrastructure depends on it. FluidDB, our social database, is entirely built on Twisted, and we've released several core parts of it as open source: txAMQP, txRDQ and txThrift. Not only that, but we have contributed to Twisted both with code and (albeit small) personal donations.

It's not just that sponsoring was the fair the thing to do, it has also produced tremendous results in a framework crucial to our business. When you donate to the TSF it's simple math that more bugs get fixed, but also the quality of the entire Twisted project is enhanced. And when that happens, all of our products are enhanced automatically without us writing one line of code. So sponsoring is not just an act of generosity, it's an investment in Fluidinfo. Using and sponsoring Twisted has been an indispensable "force multiplier" for a growing start-up like us.

    – Esteve Fernandez

       CTO, Fluidinfo Inc.