Networks – Extended

Networks used in real life, and where to go from here.

In action

Some popular companies and applications that use Twisted:

  • ITA Software developed an airline reservation system for Air Canada that uses Twisted extensively
  • Twilio – cloud telephony provider
  • Apple’s Calendar Server
  • LucasFilm – film and TV production company
  • Launchpad – application that allows developers to develop and maintain software
  • HipChat – hosted group chat that uses XMPP (Jabber)
  • Justin.tv – live video streaming
  • Tweetdeck – Twitter client for the browser
  • NASA
  • BuildBot – a continuous integration system

More success stories are on Twisted’s website.

Where to go from here

Twisted’s documentation contains a number of howtos, including web servers and clients, SMTP (mail) clients, DNS servers, and SSH servers. Complete list of tutorials and examples are listed here.

There are a number of excellent tutorials written by Dave Peticolas that don’t assume existing knowledge about networking or concurrency.

Gordon McMillan wrote a socket programming tutorial that makes use of Python’s socket library instead of Twisted.

Challenge yourself

  • Serve static content with a Twisted server. A how-to here.
  • Code a simple HTTP Proxy server using Twisted. An example here.
  • Write an RSS feed aggregator with Python/Twisted. An example here.

Additional Python Libraries

There are a couple other popular network libraries written in Python:

Books, readings, presentations