Twisted provides a variety of implementations of the twisted.internet.reactor. The specialized
implementations are suited for different purposes and are
designed to integrate better with particular platforms.
The general purpose reactor implementations are:
Platform-specific reactor implementations exist for:
The remaining custom reactor implementations provide support for integrating with the native event loops of various graphical toolkits. This lets your Twisted application use all of the usual Twisted APIs while still being a graphical application.
Twisted currently integrates with the following graphical toolkits:
When using applications that runnable using twistd, e.g.
TAPs or plugins, there is no need to choose a reactor explicitly, since
this can be chosen using twistd's -r option.
| TCP | SSL | UDP | Threading | Processes | Scheduling | Platforms | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| select() | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y (Unix only) | Y | Unix, Win32 |
| poll() | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Unix |
| Win32 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Win32 |
| Java | Y | N | N | Y | N | Y | Java 1.1+ |
| GTK+ | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y (Unix only) | Y | Unix, Win32 |
| Qt | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y (Unix only) | Y | Unix, Win32 |
| kqueue | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | FreeBSD |
| C | Y | N | N | Y | Y | Y | Unix |
The SelectReactor is the default reactor.
from twisted.internet import reactor
The SelectReactor may be explicitly installed by:
from twisted.internet import default default.install()
The PollReactor will work on any platform that provides
poll(). With larger numbers of
connected sockets, it may provide for better performance.
from twisted.internet import pollreactor pollreactor.install()
The cReactor is a high-performance C implementation of the Reactor interfaces. It is currently experimental and under active development. Be sure to see the installation notes prior to using the cReactor.
from twisted.internet import cReactor cReactor.install()
The KQueue Reactor allows Twisted to use FreeBSD's kqueue mechanism for
event scheduling. See instructions in the twisted.internet.kqreactor's
docstring for installation notes.
from twisted.internet import kqreactor kqreactor.install()
The Java Reactor allows Twisted to run under Jython. It does not currently support AWT or Swing integration.
from twisted.internet import javareactor javareactor.install()
The Win32 reactor is not yet complete and has various limitations and issues that need to be addressed. The reactor supports GUI integration with the win32gui module, so it can be used for native Win32 GUI applications.
from twisted.internet import win32eventreactor win32eventreactor.install()
Twisted integrates with PyGTK. Sample applications using GTK+ and Twisted are available in the Twisted CVS.
from twisted.internet import gtkreactor gtkreactor.install()
An example Twisted application that uses Qt can be found in
doc/examples/qtdemo.py.
from qt import QApplication app = QApplication([]) from twisted.internet import qtreactor qtreactor.install(app)
The support for Tkinter doesn't use a specialized reactor. Instead, there is some specialized support code:
from Tkinter import * from twisted.internet import tksupport root = Tk() root.withdraw() # Install the Reactor support tksupport.install(root) # Set up the interface here # Enter the Tk main loop mainloop()
An example Twisted application that uses Tk can be found in
twisted/words/ui/tkim.py.
As with Tkinter, the support for integrating Twisted with a WxPython application uses specialized support code rather than a simple reactor.
from wxPython.wx import * from twisted.internet import wxsupport, reactor myWxAppInstance = MyWxApp(0) wxsupport.install(myWxAppInstance) reactor.run()
An example Twisted application that uses WxWindows can be found
in doc/examples/wxdemo.py.