Release Digest: General, June 3, 2002

[ Thanks to Itamar
Shtull-Trauring for this link. ]

Twisted is an event-based framework for internet applications, written
in Python and licensed under the LGPL. For more information, visit:

      http://www.twistedmatrix.com

or join the list at:

      http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python


What's New since 0.17.4
=======================

0.18.0 is a major release, cleaning up many of the main APIs in 
twisted.internet and moving us much closer to a 0.99.x series leading up 
to Twisted 1.0.

- The networking core of Twisted - twisted.internet - was totally 
refactored, cleaned up, documented and improved, using explicit 
interfaces. The API is now much improved, and mostly stable. The main 
change was to create an explicit reactor object, using which you can 
schedule events, connect or listen on TCP/UDP/SSL ports, run methods in 
a thread pool, and so on. The tools that come with Twisted have been 
extended to allow choosing the reactor at runtime. Currently supported 
are select(), poll(), GTK+, Qt, Win32 event API, and Java thread based 
reactors, with wxPython and Tkinter support integrating with whichever 
reactor is chosen.

- Perspective Broker, Twisted's remote object protocol, now supports 
returning the equivalent of exceptions for failed remote method calls. 
Additionally, resource limiting was added to the implementation.

- Applications can now be persisted to XML, using marmalade, a XML 
pickle equivalent. This allows you to edit low level application 
settings using a text editor.

- Added a sample IRC bot - it listens on a channel and logs it to a file.

- Improvements to twisted.mail - the SMTP server now has basic support 
for bouncing.

- Improvements to t-im, Twisted's instant messaging client.

- LDAP was moved out into a separate package:
   http://twistedmatrix.com/users/tv/ldaptor/

- Many bug fixes, feature enhancements and additional documentatiom.


What is Twisted?
================

Twisted is an event-based framework for internet applications.  It
includes a web server, a telnet server, a chat server, a news server, a
generic client and server for remote object access, and APIs for
creating new protocols and services. Twisted supports integration of the
Tk, GTK+, Qt or wxPython event loop with its main event loop. The Win32
event loop is also supported, as is basic support for running servers on
top of Jython.

Twisted currently supports the following protocols, all implemented in
pure python, most of them as both servers and clients:

       - NNTP
       - FTP
       - HTTP
       - SOCKSv4
       - SMTP
       - IRC
       - telnet
       - POP3
       - AOL's instant messaging TOC
       - OSCAR, used by AOL-IM as well as ICQ (client only)
       - DNS
       - finger
       - Echo, discard, chargen and friends
       - Twisted Perspective Broker