Twisted Network Programming Essentials, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Writing Asynchronous Code with Deferreds

Callbacks are a fundamental part of event-driven programming and are the way that the reactor indicates to an application that an event has arrived. As event-driven programs grow, handling both the success and error cases for the events in one’s application becomes increasingly complex. Failing to register an appropriate callback can leave a program blocking on event processing that will never happen, and errors might have to propagate up a chain of callbacks from the networking stack through the layers of an application.

Twisted provides an elegant abstraction called a Deferred to manage these callbacks. This chapter will give you practice using Deferreds by themselves and then demonstrate their real-world utility by integrating Deferreds into some client and server examples.

We’ll use Deferreds while writing asynchronous servers and clients throughout the remainder of this book.

What Deferreds Do and Don’t Do

It’s worth heading off a common misconception up front:

• Deferreds do help you write asynchronous code.

• Deferreds do not automatically make code asynchronous or nonblocking. To turn a synchronous function into an asynchronous function, it’ll need to be refactored to return a Deferred with which callbacks are registered.

Practice will help you develop an intuition for how to structure asynchronous code. Let’s look at a Deferred so you can start getting some of that practice.

The Structure of a Deferred Object

Deferreds have a pair ...