Introduction

Origin

Ginkgo evolved from a project called “gevent_tools” that started as a collection of common features needed when building gevent applications. The author had previously made a habit of building lots of interesting little servers as a hobby, and then at work found himself writing and dealing with lots more given the company’s service oriented architecture. Accustomed to using the application framework in Twisted, when he finally saw the light and discovered gevent, there was no such framework for that paradigm.

Dealing with so many projects, it was not practical to reinvent the same basic features and architecture over and over again. The same way web frameworks made it easy to “throw together” a web application, there needed to be a way to quickly “throw together” network daemons. Not just simple one-off servers, but large-scale, complex applications – often part of a larger distributed system.

Through the experience of building large systems, a pattern emerged that was like a looser, more object-oriented version of the actor model based around the idea of services. This became the main feature of gevent_tools and it was later renamed gservice. However, with the hope of supporting other async mechanisms other than gevent’s green threads (such as actual threads or processes, or other similar network libraries), the project was renamed Ginkgo.

Vision

The Ginkgo microframework is a minimalist foundation for building very large systems, beyond individual daemons. There were originally plans for gevent_tools to include higher-level modules to aid in developing distributed applications, such as service discovery and messaging primitives.

While Ginkgo will remain focused on “baseline” features common to pretty much all network daemons, a supplementary project to act as a “standard library” for Ginkgo applications is planned. Together with Ginkgo, the vision would be to quickly “throw together” distributed systems from simple primitives.

Inspiration

Most of Ginkgo was envisioned by taking good ideas from other projects, simplifying to their essential properties, and integrating them together. A lot of thanks goes out to these projects.

Twisted is the first great Python evented daemon framework. The two big ideas borrowed from Twisted are their application framework and twistd. They directly inspired the service model and the Ginkgo runner.

Trac is known for the problem it solves, and not so much for its great architecture. However, its component model and configuration API were a big influence on Ginkgo. Trac components are how we think of Ginkgo services, and the way Ginkgo defines configuration settings is directly inspired by the Trac configuration API.

These projects also had some influence on Ginkgo’s design and philosophy: Gunicorn, Mongrel, Apache, Django, Flask, python-daemon, Diesel, Tornado, Erlang/OTP, Typeface, Akka, Configgy, Ostrich, and others.