[samlittlewood]

twisted - "A completely different set of batteries included."

I have deployed services using both twisted and node - some off the cuff points:

- Twisted is large, and includes many new concepts and vocabulary, with somewhat patchy documentation. There is a big hump to climb over before being productive. I was pretty much there with node on one 35 minute train ride.

- The twisted async. mantra only flies within the (albeit large) twisted cloud of classes. I often find myself deferring to threads etc. for synchronous file IO etc.

- Writing plugins for node is very approachable (including things that interact with the event loop). I use ctypes + .so for the same work in python land, but it took some experimentation and discovery (albeit not very difficult) to arrive at a good pattern for this.

Once you understand it - twisted is an enormously powerful resource, and I am still writing complex services using it. Node gets used for wrapping up computation services.