Overview of Twisted IM¶
Twisted IM (Instance Messenger) is a multi-protocol chat framework, based on the Twisted framework we’ve all come to know and love. It’s fairly simple and extensible in two directions - it’s pretty easy to add new protocols, and it’s also quite easy to add new front-ends.
Code flow¶
AccountManager¶
The control flow starts at the relevant subclass of baseaccount.AccountManager . The AccountManager is responsible for, well, managing accounts - remembering what accounts are available, their settings, adding and removal of accounts, and making accounts log on at startup.
This would be a good place to start your interface, load a
list of accounts from disk and tell them to login. Most of the
method names in AccountManager
are pretty self-explanatory, and your subclass can override
whatever it wants, but you need to override __init__
. Something like
this:
...
def __init__(self):
self.chatui = ... # Your subclass of basechat.ChatUI
self.accounts = ... # Load account list
for a in self.accounts:
a.logOn(self.chatui)
ChatUI¶
Account objects talk to the user via a subclass of basechat.ChatUI . This class keeps track of all the various conversations that are currently active, so that when an account receives and incoming message, it can put that message in its correct context.
How much of this class you need to override depends on what
you need to do. You will need to override
getConversation
(a one-on-one conversation, like
an IRC DCC chat) and getGroupConversation
(a
multiple user conversation, like an IRC channel). You might
want to override getGroup
and
getPerson
.
The main problem with the default versions of the above
routines is that they take a parameter, Class
,
which defaults to an abstract implementation of that class -
for example, getConversation
has a
Class
parameter that defaults to basechat.Conversation which
raises a lot of NotImplementedError
s. In your
subclass, override the method with a new method whose Class
parameter defaults to your own implementation of
Conversation
, that simply calls the parent
class’ implementation.
Conversation and GroupConversation¶
These classes are where your interface meets the chat
protocol. Chat protocols get a message, find the appropriate
Conversation
or GroupConversation
object, and call its methods when various interesting things
happen.
Override whatever methods you want to get the information
you want to display. You must override the hide
and show
methods, however - they are called
frequently and the default implementation raises
NotImplementedError
.
Accounts¶
An account is an instance of a subclass of basesupport.AbstractAccount .
For more details and sample code, see the various
*support
files in twisted.words.im
.