I’ve been using PyQt and Twisted to make a GUI for a webservice. The webservice was entirely written with Twisted. The UI is written in PyQt.

The only reason I chose this combination was to be able to reuse the codebase from the service in the GUI (you know, standard calls like fetch this, run a remote procedure, do X exactly like the webservice does, etc).

Turns out it was a great idea. The Twisted reactor makes the code much more readable and helps skip the signal/slot mechanism of PyQt.

Multiple threads

As with any UI, there are multiple threads carrying the heavy weight - they execute the blocking calls. Things like fetch XYZ from the webservice. If you don’t have threads, the UI would be blocked and that’s not a good thing.

With threads, everything is usable - however, you need to display progress for whatever the thread is doing. This means, multiple threads updating the UI (progress bars and what not) - this is not good.

The Qt way of solving this problem is to use signals and slots. They work - but can we do better?

The Twisted Reactor

This is where the reactor steps in. If you initialize the reactor in the main UI thread, you can queue messages in the reactor - from different threads (using the callFromThread method). This means, you don’t need a signal/slot mechanism - just the reactor is sufficient. This was a big ah-ha moment!

tl;dr: I used the Twisted reactor to communicate across multiple threads

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