Deferreds are beautiful! (A Tutorial)

Introduction

Deferreds are quite possibly the single most confusing topic that a newcomer to Twisted has to deal with. I am going to forgo the normal talk about what deferreds are, what they aren't, and why they're used in Twisted. Instead, I'm going show you the logic behind what they do.

A deferred allows you to encapsulate the logic that you'd normally use to make a series of function calls after receiving a result into a single object. In the examples that follow, I'll first show you what's going to go on behind the scenes in the deferred chain, then show you the deferred API calls that set up that chain. All of these examples are runnable code, so feel free to play around with them.