BitTorrent Style

Some notes from O’Reilly ONLamp about BitTorrent’s Design. BitTorrent is a slick, non-commercial P2P file downloading network, in vogue among techie-folk at the moment.

Article high-lights:

• BitTorrent was first written in Python, and is being ported to other languages: Java, Perl, C, and C++.

• The design principle of “idempotence”—something I use regularly, but without the fancy name.

• BitTorrent’s author, Bram Cohen, calls his code “maintainable”, though the article’s write notes “while [BitTorrent is] written in very clear Python, the magic isn’t easy to grasp.” :)

For something this complex, implementing in Python first is attractive. Python is a good for experimentation, something that would have been important in BitTorrent’s early days. I can imagine that each new version of BitTorrent will be built and tested in Python first.

Meanwhile, because Bram Cohen was careful to define BitTorrent’s wire-protocol, implementations in other languages are appearing. Lesson: when writing a product, define and document any inter-program protocols, separate from the API.

ONLamp have a few other Python Articles.

via the Daily Python URL for July 21.