<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en"><head><title>Twisted Documentation: Naming Conventions</title><link href="../howto/stylesheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /></head><body bgcolor="white"><h1 class="title">Naming Conventions</h1><div class="toc"><ol></ol></div><div class="content"><span></span><p>While this may sound like a small detail, clear method naming is important to provide an API that developers familiar with event-based programming can pick up quickly.</p><p>Since the idea of a method call maps very neatly onto that of a received event, all event handlers are simply methods named after past-tense verbs. All class names are descriptive nouns, designed to mirror the is-a relationship of the abstractions they implement. All requests for notification or transmission are present-tense imperative verbs.</p><p>Here are some examples of this naming scheme:</p><ul><li>An event notification of data received from peer: <code class="python">dataReceived(data)</code></li><li>A request to send data: <code class="python">write(data)</code></li><li>A class that implements a protocol: <code class="python">Protocol</code></li></ul><p>The naming is platform neutral. This means that the names are equally appropriate in a wide variety of environments, as long as they can publish the required events.</p><p>It is self-consistent. Things that deal with TCP use the acronym TCP, and it is always capitalized. Dropping, losing, terminating, and closing the connection are all referred to as <q>losing</q> the connection. This symmetrical naming allows developers to easily locate other API calls if they have learned a few related to what they want to do.</p><p>It is semantically clear. The semantics of dataReceived are simple: there are some bytes available for processing. This remains true even if the lower-level machinery to get the data is highly complex.</p></div><p><a href="../howto/index.html">Index</a></p><span class="version">Version: 1.3.0</span></body></html>