As some of you may be aware, my birthday is coming up soon. I'd like to say
publicly the same thing that I've said several years running: if I didn't
get a present for you, don't get a present for me. I have plenty of stuff
lying around - way too much, in fact. Ying has been busily EBaying off the
things that we don't use, and we're not close to halfway done.
However, I realize that these words are an empty gesture, especially to my
family, who are routinely generous and wonderful to me regardless of how
callous and awful a person I am. So for those of you who are hell-bent on
making something of this most recent anniversary of my birth, I will stoop
to a new low with this suggestion. Send money:
.
I'll put down the self-deprecation for a moment and explain. A major source
of anxiety for me these days is the state of the Twisted project's direction. I know there
are several things that need to happen to push it to the next level of
success, and there are plenty of people who only need a little bit of
encouragement to do those things. However, I am spending most of my time and
encouragement on another project right
now, and it doesn't look like I'm going to get a reprieve any time soon.
I've also got a personal deal with myself that I'm not going to spend any
more of my own monetary resources on Twisted until something related to it
has made me a millionaire ;-).
There has been plenty
of discussion recently on the mailing list about problems with the
project's public presence, even some specific
recommendations about soliciting donations.
It would make a terrific gift for people to put some money towards this
goal. It would encourage me personally to go out and write up some
explanations of what needs to be done, secure in the knowledge that I'll
actually be able to incent other peoples' contribution of time and my effort
writing those
specifications wouldn't be wasted. Ultimately, It would take a huge
burden off my mind to see Twisted's progress towards my goals for it get
unstuck.
By the way - since I'm asking for this as a gift, not as an official fund
drive, I'm not going to post public statistics or fundraising goals or
anything like that. If I had the time and energy to do a real fund drive I
probably wouldn't be posting anything more than that initial paragraph. In
fact, if there are a lot of donations I will probably contribute some of
them towards the work required for setting up such a drive.
Okay, I realize I'm a bit late to the phenomenon here, but wow.
Listen to The Ghost That Feeds - and while you're at it, read about hungry ghosts.
Listen to The Ghost That Feeds - and while you're at it, read about hungry ghosts.
Congratulations, . Getting sued by a major corporation is probably a rite of passage for every successful business owner. I just hope we're as well prepared when we get one.
or, "let's figure out where we're going before we get
there"
I realized during the huge thread this week on TPML that one of the major problems with Twisted's documentation is the lack of any roadmap.
I am prone to starting overly ambitious projects, so of course my first idea was to start on a new "roadmap website" where I would document the 5-year-plan.
Through some force of will I am managing not to do this and I will try to break up a few ideas that I have and post them here.
This closely matches how people are using Twisted right now.
There should be a simple template from which all 'twistified' programs are taken. It should provide support to your command for a useful subset of the same command-line options that twistd supports, and should provide a nice easy way to identify which reactor needs to be installed in order to use it.
It should be easy to identify a 'twistified' program in the same way that it is easy to identify a GNU program. There should be a large set of consistent options and a consistent configuration file format (probably some subset of Python).
There should be very good plugin support, and good plugin detection support for every protocol. There should be a plugin management interface (echoes of COIL anyone?) available through the web UI.
There should be a program included with the Twisted sumo distribution, that uses the startup library described above, which starts up and binds a port for every protocol Twisted supports. At the least, it should do IRC, OSCAR, HTTP, FTP, SSH, LDAP*, IMAP, POP, and SMTP.
Each of these servers should have some level of application running on it - a thin enough layer that implements the semantics of some protocol that it's possible to find a interface point for plugins. Installed on each should be (for properly authenticated users) a plugin which executes Python commands. For example, manhole/conch under SSH, an AJAX-y web form that serves as an interactive prompt, a chatterbot over OSCAR and IRC that does the same.
Cred should also be extended to handle basic user creation and there should be a provided web control panel UI for manipulating a user-database of your choice.
I feel that this latter objective is neglected because the design is difficult, but it is still very important. Without some "official" way of making protocols interoperate, Twisted will be an underachiever, since it will only provide a simpler way to write applications that you could have built from scratch. When people can write components that hook together in novel and unexpected ways though - that is when an entirely new class of application can be enabled.
That doesn't mean that people should stop writing applications, either - simply that applications which embed the Twisted webserver have the option (default to on, but of course can be turned off) of allowing Twisted web plugins to be loaded into that server. Twisted chat server applications can similarly embed in-server bots.
Eventually, if the APIs for these respective application domains are really good, applications would be small wrappers that launched the plugin daemon with a pre-set configuration. The optimal situation would be if I could unconditionally declare that using plugins is a better idea than writing your own Twisted mainpoint. In order for that to be the case though, there will have to be a plugin system which loads UI modules in a variety of different toolkits and that is an even bigger project I don't want to talk about today.
*: Yes, I realize this is not a currently supported protocol. We'd have to write something.
I realized during the huge thread this week on TPML that one of the major problems with Twisted's documentation is the lack of any roadmap.
I am prone to starting overly ambitious projects, so of course my first idea was to start on a new "roadmap website" where I would document the 5-year-plan.
Through some force of will I am managing not to do this and I will try to break up a few ideas that I have and post them here.
Twisted as a library
This closely matches how people are using Twisted right now.
There should be a simple template from which all 'twistified' programs are taken. It should provide support to your command for a useful subset of the same command-line options that twistd supports, and should provide a nice easy way to identify which reactor needs to be installed in order to use it.
It should be easy to identify a 'twistified' program in the same way that it is easy to identify a GNU program. There should be a large set of consistent options and a consistent configuration file format (probably some subset of Python).
Twisted as a framework
There should be very good plugin support, and good plugin detection support for every protocol. There should be a plugin management interface (echoes of COIL anyone?) available through the web UI.
There should be a program included with the Twisted sumo distribution, that uses the startup library described above, which starts up and binds a port for every protocol Twisted supports. At the least, it should do IRC, OSCAR, HTTP, FTP, SSH, LDAP*, IMAP, POP, and SMTP.
Each of these servers should have some level of application running on it - a thin enough layer that implements the semantics of some protocol that it's possible to find a interface point for plugins. Installed on each should be (for properly authenticated users) a plugin which executes Python commands. For example, manhole/conch under SSH, an AJAX-y web form that serves as an interactive prompt, a chatterbot over OSCAR and IRC that does the same.
Cred should also be extended to handle basic user creation and there should be a provided web control panel UI for manipulating a user-database of your choice.
I feel that this latter objective is neglected because the design is difficult, but it is still very important. Without some "official" way of making protocols interoperate, Twisted will be an underachiever, since it will only provide a simpler way to write applications that you could have built from scratch. When people can write components that hook together in novel and unexpected ways though - that is when an entirely new class of application can be enabled.
That doesn't mean that people should stop writing applications, either - simply that applications which embed the Twisted webserver have the option (default to on, but of course can be turned off) of allowing Twisted web plugins to be loaded into that server. Twisted chat server applications can similarly embed in-server bots.
Eventually, if the APIs for these respective application domains are really good, applications would be small wrappers that launched the plugin daemon with a pre-set configuration. The optimal situation would be if I could unconditionally declare that using plugins is a better idea than writing your own Twisted mainpoint. In order for that to be the case though, there will have to be a plugin system which loads UI modules in a variety of different toolkits and that is an even bigger project I don't want to talk about today.
*: Yes, I realize this is not a currently supported protocol. We'd have to write something.
I am spending quite a bit more time in Windows lately. Since I generally use CapsLock as an additional Control key, I am frequently annoyed by the inability to do this easily on Windows. I'm sure there are others with the same problem, so here's a nice, easy way to do it.