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For
Immediate Release
CONTACT:
Aron Trauring
Zoteca
2472 Broadway, Suite 195
New York, NY 10025
Tel: +1 (212) 905-3261
Fax: +1 (212) 439-4178
Direct: +1 (917) 496-6240
email: aronst@zoteca.com
http://www.zoteca.com/
Twisted
Middleware Framework Gains IT Acceptance as it Reaches 1.0
Milestone
New York, NY -- October 17, 2002 -- What does
Internet gaming have to do with space flight? A new middleware
framework that was originally developed for Internet gaming
applications is now finding its way into organizations such
as NASA, Masters of Branding and major IT organizations around
the world. The Twisted framework, used for building sophisticated
asynchronous, event-driven, applications for distributed network
environments, has just hit 1.0 status. Users are already raving.
The brainchild of Matthew Lefkowitz, who goes
by the moniker of Glyph, Twisted was originally developed
for building distributed Internet-based gaming environments.
``Massively multiplayer games are among the most complex systems
deployed on the Internet today,'' says Glyph. ``While purpose-built
business application software at most integrate two or three
simultaneous processes -- e.g., managing inventory while processing
payments -- games need to integrate ten or more distributed
processes running in parallel: combat, crafting, a virtual
economy, housing, and vehicles, among others.'' From the beginning,
Glyph released Twisted as an open-source development project.
It soon became obvious that by solving the hard problems of
Internet gaming, Glyph had come up with a bleeding-edge solution
for tough IT development in the Internet environment. Itamar
Shtull-Trauring, Zoteca's Chief Technical Architect, came
across Twisted when he was looking for a back-end for Zoteca's
secure data-sharing platform. ``I investigated all the alternatives,''
says Itamar. ``It was immediately apparent that by using Twisted
I could develop our distributed back-end in a quarter of the
time with many-more features out of the box.'' Itamar soon
joined Glyph as one of the lead programmers in the Twisted
open-source project, and added Twisted to Zoteca's base offerings.
Twisted is a sophisticated event-driven network
framework that provides extremely powerful, scalable and flexible
enterprise application integration capabilities. At the core
of Twisted is its network layer which can be used to rapidly
integrate any existing protocol as well as model new ones.
Whenever the need arises to develop a new protocol, the asynchronous,
multiplexed and two-way remote object protocol (ROP) can be
used to quickly implement it. Because the ROP is used with
object-level abstractions, changes can be made easily, and
new features added, without having to deal with the design
restrictions and application development complexities of a
custom protocol.
Out of the box, Twisted supports a large number
of service protocols: HTTP, FTP, SMTP, LDAP, DNS, SOCKSv4,
SSH, IRC, telnet, POP3, AOL's instant messaging and more.
This allows developers to use these protocols immediately,
without having to spend time re-implementing them. In addition,
Twisted can talk to multiple, industry standard DBMS. It also
can be used to communicate with COM servers and to control
and integrate with standard Windows applications (Word, Excel,
etc.).
Unlike other frameworks, that are designed
to address a specific domain -- email, Web sites, Web services
-- Twisted is designed to support both multiple frameworks
and multiple protocols at the same time. Thus, Twisted can
be used to implement web sites, web services, email servers,
or instant messaging servers. Moreover, these services can
all run in the same process. Among the services already implemented
with Twisted are:
- distributed hash tables
- distributed web applications
- distributed web servers
- remote document batch processing
- real-time web chat
- graphical chat clients
- IM information bots
- protocol proxies
- notification agents
- massively multiplayer games
As Twisted approached 1.0 status, IT managers
around the world began to use it in critical projects. Stephen
Waterbury, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/),
has this to say: "My team is developing a modular application
to integrate CAD/CAE/CAM tools and data and to enable collaboration
among distributed teams of engineers working on NASA projects.
We have selected Twisted as our framework because of its pluggable,
asynchronous protocols, support for multiple interfaces and
protocols per service, integration with PostgreSQL, and just
generally excellent layered architecture."
Masters of Branding (http://www.mastersofbranding.com/)
develops Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications
for Fortune 500 companies. Bob Ippolito, CTO, reports: ``We
use Twisted as the networking core for all of our client and
server RFID software.'' Ippolito likes Twisted ease of use
and broad multi-protocol support: ``It was by far the easiest
framework to develop with, debug under, and extend for our
purposes to support protocols such as SOAP, HTTP, and Macromedia
Flash-compatible XML Sockets. The API and event model are
both very well thought out and has accommodated all of our
networking needs from database-heavy server software on Linux
to (py)OpenGL visualization applications on win32.''
Ippolito also stresses Twisted's portability:
``The ease and power of Python and Twisted really showed through
when we took one of our applications developed in and for
Linux and ported it to run as a Windows NT service in less
than day.'' Ippolito would definitely recommend others adopt
Twisted: ``New users to the framework will not only be impressed
by the power of the software, but also that the developer/user
community responsible for it are incredibly helpful.''
Adelux, based in Paris, France, develops custom
Internet applications such as portals, network security tools,
communication-related programs, and software that leverages
other systems. ``We discovered Twisted 10 months ago, and
now it is a key element of our development strategy.'' notes
Luc Stepniewski, Head Engineer. ``We have successfully used
Twisted on several projects, of very different problem domains.''
Stepniewski stresses the scalability of Twisted
in large-scale applications: ``We developed a highly scalable
real-time application for customer support, which serves web-based
clients as well as clients implemented in any of the many
protocols supported by Twisted. Twisted was also used to develop
targeted proxies for various applications supporting more
than 15.000 users. Twisted handles the charge with no problem.''
When asked about the future of Twisted at
Adelux, Stepniewski responds: ``We intend to continue using
Twisted on upcoming projects, especially since integrated
support for databases and new services are being added very
quickly. We found Twisted to be powerful, comprehensible,
well documented, and backed by a good helpful community. We'll
use it on our next products for sure!''
Finally: ``Twisted is an invaluable framework
that permits obscenely fast prototyping and iterative development
of game systems, and is more stable and robust than any internal
system with which I've worked!" says Brian Urbanek, Senior
Designer at Ninjaneering, a game development studio.
With Version 1.0 freezing the fundamental
APIs, and promising added stability and robustness, Twisted
is poised to become the leading middleware framework of its
class.
A white-paper on Twisted may be found here:
http://www.zoteca.com/wp/zbefull.pdf
For more information about commercial support
for Twisted contact:
GLYPH LEFKOWITZ is the Twisted Matrix
Labs project leader. Glyph is an independent consultant, helping
organizations develop and deploy Twisted and other open-source
solutions from departmental to worldwide scale. In spear-heading
the Twisted project, Glyph leads a team of 19 developers and
manages all parts of the development process, from high-level
design to remote object protocol and low-level event loop
programming. Glyph is a published author, and has written
several papers on the design and implementation of the Twisted
framework. For more information visit:
http://www.twistedmatrix.com/glyph/
ZOTECA offers a software workbench
for the rapid development of efficient, safe, robust and scalable
applications used in distributed, networked environments.
Zoteca combines open source technologies with our unique extensions,
offering powerful frameworks for information technology in
the Internet age. The Zoteca Workbench has three main components.
Our base toolkit is the Zoteca BackEnd (ZBE), our commercially
supported version of Twisted, a middleware framework for rapidly
developing asynchronous, multi-protocol, event-driven, distributed
applications. Using the ZBE, extended by patent-pending technology,
Zoteca offers Data Sharing frameworks (ZDS) which provide
Reliable, Available, Private and Secure ("RAPS") data sharing.
The third component, Zoteca Application Tools (ZAT), is a
set of open-source, object-oriented programming tools, that
together with the ZBE and ZDS make for an unrivaled distributed
programming workbench. Zoteca offers support and consulting
services for all components of our software workbench, including
ZBE (Twisted), Python and Zope. Zoteca also offers application
toolkits and products based on the workbench. For more information
visit:
http://www.zoteca.com/
TWISTED MATRIX LABORATORIES is
the virtual home of the Twisted open source development community.
For more information or if you would like to get involved
visit:
http://www.twistedmatrix.com/
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