Twisted Glossary

Absolute submodel paths: The full path to a Model object, starting at the root. For example, /foo/bar/baz
adaptee: An object that has been adapted, also called original. See Adapter.
Adapter: An object whose sole purpose is to implement an Interface for another object. See Interfaces and Adapters.
Application: A twisted.application.service.Application. There are HOWTOs on creating and manipulating them as a system-administrator, as well as using them in your code.
Authorizer: (Deprecated; this is part old cred) An object responsible for managing Identities. See twisted.cred.authorizer.
Avatar: (from Twisted Cred) business logic for specific user. For example, in PB these are perspectives, in pop3 these are mailboxes, and so on.
Banana: The low-level data marshalling layer of Twisted Spread. See twisted.spread.banana.
Broker: A twisted.spread.pb.Broker, the object request broker for Twisted Spread.
cache: A way to store data in readily accessible place for later reuse. Caching data is often done because the data is expensive to produce or access. Caching data risks being stale, or out of sync with the original data.
COIL: COnfiguration ILlumination. It is a (stagnant and incomplete) end-user interface for configuring Twisted applications. See twisted.coil.
component: A special kind of (persistent) Adapter that works with a twisted.python.components.Componentized. See also Interfaces and Adapters.
Componentized: A Componentized object is a collection of information, separated into domain-specific or role-specific instances, that all stick together and refer to each other. Each object is an Adapter, which, in the context of Componentized, we call components. See also Interfaces and Adapters.
conch: Twisted's SSH implementation.
Connector: Object used to interface between client connections and protocols, usually used with a twisted.internet.protocol.ClientFactory to give you control over how a client connection reconnects. See twisted.internet.interfaces.IConnector and Writing Clients.
Consumer: An object that consumes data from a Producer. See twisted.internet.interfaces.IConsumer.
controller: (In Woven) an object which accepts input from the user in the form of mouse clicks, keypresses, and web form submissions, and updates the Model component.
Cred: Twisted's authentication API, twisted.cred. See Introduction to Twisted Cred and Twisted Cred usage.
credentials: A username/password, public key, or some other information used for authentication.
credential checker: Where authentication actually happens. See ICredentialChecker.
CVSToys: A nifty set of tools for CVS, available at http://twistedmatrix.com/users/acapnotic/wares/code/CVSToys/.
Deferred: A instance of twisted.internet.defer.Deferred, an abstraction for handling chains of callbacks and error handlers (errbacks). See the Deferring Execution HOWTO.
Enterprise: Twisted's RDBMS support. It contains twisted.enterprise.adbapi for asynchronous access to any standard DB-API 2.0 module, and twisted.enterprise.row, a Relational Object Wrapper. See Introduction to Twisted Enterprise and Twisted Enterprise Row Objects for more details.
errback: A callback attached to a Deferred with .addErrback to handle errors.
Factory: In general, an object that constructs other objects. In Twisted, a Factory usually refers to a twisted.internet.protocol.Factory, which constructs Protocol instances for incoming or outgoing connections. See Writing Servers and Writing Clients.
Failure: Basically, an asynchronous exception that contains traceback information; these are used for passing errors through asynchronous callbacks.
Identity: (Deprecated). A Cred object that represents a single user with a username and a password of some sort.
im, t-im: Abbreviation of (Twisted) Instance Messenger.
Instance Messenger: Instance Messenger is a multi-protocol chat program that comes with Twisted. It can communicate via TOC with the AOL servers, via IRC, as well as via PB with Twisted Words. See twisted.im.
Interface: A class that defines and documents methods that a class conforming to that interface needs to have. A collection of core twisted.internet interfaces can be found in twisted.internet.interfaces. See also Interfaces and Adapters.
Jelly: The serialization layer for Twisted Spread, although it can be used seperately from Twisted Spread as well. It is similar in purpose to Python's standard pickle module, but is more network-friendly, and depends on a separate marshaller (Banana, in most cases). See twisted.spread.jelly.
Lore: twisted.lore is Twisted's documentation system. The source format is a subset of XHTML, and output formats include HTML and LaTeX. See lore(1) and the Twisted Documentation Standard.
Manhole: A debugging/administration interface to a Twisted application.
Marmalade: An XML-based serialisation module. See twisted.persisted.marmalade.
Microdom: A partial DOM implementation using SUX. It is simple and pythonic, rather than strictly standards-compliant. See twisted.web.microdom.
model: An object that contains data and business logic for manipulating this data.
model stack: A stack of Model instances which keeps track of the Model that is currently in scope during the Woven Page rendering process.
Names: Twisted's DNS server, found in twisted.names.
overrides: (In Woven) A way to add data to cached data. Overrides are not replaced when base data is updated.
pattern: A node in a Woven HTML template whose sole purpose is to be copied and filled with data by a View component.
relative submodel path: A partial path to a Model object, relative to the top of the Model stack.
PB: Abbreviation of Perspective Broker.
Perspective: A Cred object; an Identity's perspective (or view) onto a Service. There may be many Perspectives associated with an Identity, and an Identity may have multiple Perspectives onto the same Service.
Perspective Broker: The high-level object layer of Twisted Spread, implementing semantics for method calling and object copying, caching, and referencing. See twisted.spread.pb.
Portal: Glues credential checkers and realms together.
Producer: An object that generates data a chunk at a time, usually to be processed by a Consumer. See twisted.internet.interfaces.IProducer.
Protocol: In general each network connection has its own Protocol instance to manage connection-specific state. There is a collection of standard protocol implementations in twisted.protocols. See also Writing Servers and Writing Clients.
PSU: There is no PSU.
Reactor: The core event-loop of a Twisted application. See Reactor Basics.
Reality: See Twisted Reality
realm: (in Twisted Cred) stores avatars and perhaps general business logic. See IRealm.
Resource: A twisted.web.resource.Resource, which are served by Twisted Web. Resources can be as simple as a static file on disk, or they can have dynamically generated content.
ROW: Relational Object Wrapper, an object-oriented interface to a relational database. See Twisted Enterprise Row Objects.
Service: A twisted.application.service.Service. See Application howto for a description of how they relate to Applications.
Spread: Twisted Spread is Twisted's remote-object suite. It consists of three layers: Perspective Broker, Jelly and Banana. See Writing Applications with Perspective Broker.
Sturdy: A persistent reference manager for PB. See twisted.spread.sturdy.
submodel paths: A path to a Model object. A way of referring to a piece of data in a Woven template that allows Python to locate the data in a tree of python objects.
SUX: Small Uncomplicated XML, Twisted's simple XML parser written in pure Python. See twisted.protocols.sux.
TAP: Twisted Application Pickle, or simply just a Twisted APplication. A serialised application that created with mktap and runnable by twistd. See Using the Utilities.
Tendril: A bridge between Twisted Words and IRC. See twisted.words.tendril.
Trial: twisted.trial, Twisted's unit-testing framework, modelled after pyunit. See also Twisted's Test Standard.
Twisted Matrix Laboratories: The team behind Twisted. http://twistedmatrix.com/.
Twisted Reality: In days of old, the Twisted Reality multiplayer text-based interactive-fiction system was the main focus of Twisted Matrix Labs; Twisted, the general networking framework, grew out of Reality's need for better network functionality. Twisted Reality has since been broken off into a separate project.
usage: The twisted.python.usage module, a replacement for the standard getopt module for parsing command-lines which is much easier to work with. See Parsing command-lines.
wcfactory: A factory method for producing Controller objects when a controller= directive is encountered in a Woven Template.
wchild: In Woven, a factory method for producing objects which represent URL segments below the current object.
widgets: In Woven, a View subclass which specializes in rendering a fragment of the DOM tree.
wmfactory: A factory method for producing Model objects when a model= directive is encountered in a Woven Template.
Words: Twisted Words is a multi-protocol chat server that uses the Perspective Broker protocol as its native communication style. See twisted.words.
Woven: Web Object Visualization Environment. A web templating system based on XML and the Model-View-Controller design pattern. See Developing Componentized Applications using Woven.
wvfactory: A factory method for producing View objects when a view= directive is encoutered in a WovenTemplate.
Zoot: Twisted's Gnutella implementation (currently very incomplete). See twisted.zoot.