So I've had it in mind to use Twisted for doing various ugly networking tasks that CherryPy doesn't seem appropriate for (since it's a threaded server and I don't want to tie up threads doing things that take an unknown amount of time).

So far it's working well. I've implemented two different services (an RSS aggregator and an IRC proxy) that simply do their tasks, then serve up the data as an XML RPC service on localhost.

I did the RSS aggregator a week or so ago, and tonight hacked together the IRC proxy (the idea being a way to offer customer support via IRC without requiring them to install an IRC client).

The single ugliness in the whole thing (from my POV anyway) is having to poll the server from Javascript every n seconds to see if new messages are posted. I'd like to find a way around that. It's not the Javascript itself that's ugly (MochiKit makes it quite simple), rather it's the concept of needlessly polling that bugs me.

I'm wondering about utilizing a timeout (i.e. the server doesn't respond until it actually has data) to this end. If the Javascript gets data within the timeout, it displays it and runs again. If it doesn't, it runs again. This would reduce the latency (no n second delay between updates) and the number of hits on the server. On the downside, it would increase the number of open sockets, but I doubt we're looking at such a huge load of IRC users that this would be an issue.