[Zope-dev] A modest proposal: Replace medusa with Twisted

[Michel Pelletier]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001 16:05:06 +0200
 Itamar Shtull-Trauring <lists@itamarst.org> wrote:

> 2) Plugging in a different transports instead of TCP (e.g. SSL) is much
> easier in Twisted than medusa, as far as I can tell. In m2crypto's medusa
> ssl code very protocol needs its own subclass in order supports SSL. In
> Twisted that is done transparently - the protocol doesn't have to worry
> about the transport. Basically any protocol (excepting perhaps FTP) could
> run out of the box with SSL in Twisted, using the one SSL support module. Or
> Unix domain sockets for that matter :)
> 
> 3) Twisted provides a larger number of protocols out of the box (e.g. pure
> python LDAP client, AOL TOC, IRC, POP3, SMTP, telnet) than medusa. Hopefully
>    we will soon have an integrated DNS server as well, though I can't think
> how *that* would help Zope.

Just to throw out another idea, Amos has discussed with me in the past the idea of replacing medusa with Apache 2.0.  Compelling as many of Twisted's features may be, Apache 2.0 as far as i can tell supports many of them as well (except perhaps jython integration, which is a pipe dream anyway for Zope).  Apache has the upshot in that it is rock solid, tested by millions, trusted by even more, and no doubt one of the most actively developed peices of software there is.

For ZC the upshots of 1) not needing to maintain it, and 2) it being a excellent marketing tool outweight many technical benifits that twisted may have that Apache doesn't (I'd like to know what the differences are, however).  For example, does twisted do URL rewriting?  proxy?  process/thread job control?

Twisted does have the advantage of 1, but not 2.  Further, our faith in the continuing development of Apache is, de facto, more than that of twisted simply based on the age, number of users, and number of developers of each project.

I'm not dismissing the idea, I'm just pointing out an alternative to Itamar's alternative.  ;)

-Michel