Why Twisted Changed My Life

So at Open Source Bridge I ran into the folks at OSU's Open Source Lab. They were a huge help for flushing out the high level architecture of my connection server for Cockerel. Their project, pydra, was on my list of libraries for implementing a non-blocking i/o server. Had I done it that way, I would have been in for some pain. That is definitely not
what pydra was designed for; its great for large processing jobs over networks. Instead, they suggested using Twisted.

For those who don't know, Twisted is a Python library designed for building async-network servers. Internal classes include, protocols for connections, bare-bones ssh clients, irc clients/servers, and a variety of other utilities for building your async-server/client
application. The maturity of the libraries allowed me to build out a simple connection protocol in a little over 30 minutes.

Implimenting a server protocol in Twisted is very simple. You can begin with the base protocol.Protocol, for example, and then define a dataReceived() method that processes the data. That's pretty much it! Now, dealing with exceptions and other particulars is clearly going to take most of the dev time, but the basics of your server can be completed just like that. I highly recommend trying it out.

Thanks again to OSL! Y'ALL ROCK!