Looking at the original BitTorrent client

I wanted to learn more about how the original BitTorrent client implemented "choking", so I downloaded the source to the original Python-based BitTorrent client from SourceForge.

I was impressed, as ever, by the brevity and clarity of Python. The original BitTorrent client sources are very easy to read. (Especially now that I understand the problem domain pretty well.) The code has a nice OO design, with a clear separation of responsibilities.

I was also impressed by the extensive use of unit tests. About half the code in the BitTorrent source is unit tests of the different classes, to make sure that the program behaves correctly. This is a really good idea when developing a peer-to-peer application. The synthetic tests let you test things like your end-of-torrent logic immediately, rather than by having to find an active torrent swarm and wait for a real-world torrent to complete.

When I get a chance I'm going to refactor the Taipei-Torrent code into smaller classes and add unit tests like the original BitTorrent client implementation has.

And come to think of it, why didn't I check out the original BitTorrent client code sooner? It would have saved me some time and I'd probably have a better result. D'Oh! Oh well, live and learn!

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