[Dev] Twisted has a home on Chandler Wiki

[Brian Kirsch]

Greetings,

The determination was made a few weeks back to incorporate the Twisted  
framework in Chandler for among other things its very good IMAP  
libraries.
Initial it was though that Twisted would run in a thread and be  
callable by other components within Chandler's multi-threaded  
architecture.

Since this decision was made some issues have been raised about the  
effectiveness of Chandler's current Threading model.

It has been suggested that the Twisted Asynchronous event loop might be  
a better solution. Twisted does have a learning curve and utilizing
the Reactor (Asynchronous event core) would require internal OSAF  
developers to learn the Twisted framework model. We would of course
abstract the internal workings of Twisted from third party developers.

Improving Chandler's Threading model is something I feel strongly about  
and have been told by others that they feel the same.
To encourage this discussion I have created a Wiki home page for all  
things Twisted. Here I have placed tutorials, sample code,
issues, discussions, howto's, and links to the Twisted API.

If those interested in addressing the threading issue could familiarize  
with the basics of Twisted it will make for a more in depth (heated?)  
discussion .

Regardless of our threading decision, the Twisted Reactor core will be  
available with in Chandler.
Twisted offers easy out of the box implementations of Servers and  
Clients for most standard protocols.
This is a tremendous advantage for Chandler.

Please check out the page: <a  
href="http://wiki.osafoundation.org/twiki/bin/view/Chandler/ 
TwistedHome">TwistedHome</a>.

I welcome any feedback on ways to improve this page in the future.

As part of my research in to integrating Twisted in a threaded  
application I created some detail thread testing
programs. The links to these are available on the Wiki <a  
href="http://wiki.osafoundation.org/twiki/bin/view/Chandler/ 
TwistedHome">TwistedHome</a>. page.


Brian Kirsch - Email Framework Engineer
Open Source Applications Foundation
543 Howard St. 5th Floor 
San Francisco, CA 94105 
(415) 946-3056