Twisted is a framework, written in Python, for writing networked applications. Twisted includes implementations of a number of commonly used network services such as a web server, an IRC chat server, a mail server, a relational database interface and an object broker.

Developers can build applications using all of these services as well as custom services that they write themselves. Twisted also includes a user authentication system that controls access to services and provides services with user context information to implement their own security models.

Here are some key features of "Twisted":

· Pluggable event loops allowing the developer to take advantage of platform-specific capabilities.
· Abstractions of protocols and transports.
· Through Twisted Spread, mechanisms for network encoding of data (in Python, Java, ELisp, and other languages), to a full-blown distributed object system.

Twisted is an integration point for network services that were previously unable to interoperate. Services within a Twisted server can communicate with each other and share information providing a very integrated programming environment that can re-use large amounts of infrastructure across multiple network mediums (such as chat, web, and mail).

As well as servers, Twisted supports several different kinds of clients and GUIs. This means that the client can re-use large portions of the server's code, improving test coverage and reliability while reducing code size.

Twisted is a collection of servers and clients, which can be used either by developers of new applications or directly.