twisted.words.service

Package twisted :: Package words :: Module service |
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## Module twisted.words.service

Twisted Words Service objects. Chat and messaging for Twisted.

Twisted words is a general-purpose chat and instant messaging system designed to be a suitable replacement both for Instant Messenger systems and conferencing systems like IRC.

Currently it provides presence notification, web-based account creation, and a simple group-chat abstraction.

Stability: incendiary

Maintainer: Maintainer: Glyph Lefkowitz

Future Plans: Woah boy. This module is incredibly unstable. It has an incredible deficiency of features. There are also several features which are pretty controvertial. As far as stability goes, it is lucky that the current interfaces are really simple: at least the uppermost external ones will almost certainly be preserved, but there is a lot of plumbing work.

First of all the fact that users must have accounts generated through a web interface to sign in is a serious annoyance, especially to people who are familiar with IRC's semantics. The following features are proposed to mitigate this annoyance:

- account creation through the various client interfaces available to Words users.
- guest accounts, so that users who join for an hour once don't pollute the authentication database with huge amounts of cruft.
- 'mood' metadata for users. Since you can't change nicks, you need a way to do the equivalent thing on IRC where people will sign in multiple times and have foo_work and foo_home

There is no plan to make it possible to log-in without an account. This is simply a broken behavior of IRC; all possible convenience features that mimic this should be integrated, but authentication is an important part of chat.

There are also certain things that are just missing.

- restricted group operations. Typical IRC-style stuff, except you don't ever see the @. Permimssions should be grantable in a capability style, rather than with a single bit.
- server-to-server communication. As much as possible this should be decentralized and not have the notion of 'hub' servers; rooms have 'physical' locality. This is really hard to integrate with IRC client protocol stuff, so it may end up that this feature requires a rewrite of Twisted Words so that servers that present an IRC gateway are treated as leaf nodes, and the recommended mode of operation is for the user to run a lightweight proxy locally.
- a serious logging, monitoring, and routing framework

Then there's a whole bunch of things that would be nice to have.

- public key authentication
- robust wire-level security
- integrated consensus web authoring tools
- management tools and guidelines for community leaders
- interface to operator functionality through 'bot' interface with per-channel personality configuration
- graphical extensions to clients to allow formatted text (but detect obviously annoying or abusive formatting)
- rate limiting, simple DoS protection, firewall integration
- basically everything OPN wants to be able to do, but better

Classes
`Group` | This class represents a group of people engaged in a chat session with one another.
`IWordsClient` | A client to a perspective on the twisted.words service.
`IWordsPolicy` |
`NormalPolicy` |
`Participant` |
`Service` | I am a chat service.
`Transcript` | I am a transcript of a conversation between multiple parties.
`WordsClient` |

Exceptions
`NotInCollectionError` |
`NotInGroupError` |
`UserNonexistantError` |
`WordsError` |
`WrongStatusError` |

Variable Summary
`int` | `AWAY` = 2
`int` | `OFFLINE` = 0
`int` | `ONLINE` = 1
`list` | `statuses` = `['Offline', 'Online', 'Away']`

Variable Details

    ### AWAY Type: `int` Value:
        2

    ### OFFLINE Type: `int` Value:
        0

    ### ONLINE Type: `int` Value:
        1

    ### statuses Type: `list` Value:
        ['Offline', 'Online', 'Away']

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