For the last few days, I have been exploring Twisted, a potent application framework for the wonderful Python language. Twisted has to be one of the coolest chunks of code I've played with in a long time. Coding is fun again!
For a start, Twisted is written in the uber-cool Python language. It is an asynchronous framework designed to build internet-enabled applications. Twisted provides implementations of many standard protocols, such as SMTP, SSH, NNTP, HTTP, FTP, Telnet, IRC, AIM/Oscar, and more. So basically you can turn your application into the most wired platform around.
In a few lines, add a web server to your program; instant statistics, system monitoring, and more. Hack some more, and you can turn it into an IRC client, so you can have developers chatting on a channel sending messages to a server, asking it to do stuff. Twisted also supports the Python DBAPI, so you can database-enable your app and have long SQL calls happen asynchronously and not tie up the app. It also integrates with several different GUI toolkits, such as Gtk+ and Qt.
I am evaluating Twisted for a large project I am working on, and it is looking extremely promising. It appears it will save a huge amount of development time, and allow us to focus on the core app while giving us all these facilities for free.
It's hard not to gush about Twisted, it is so cool. So go check it out for yourself!
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