Fictional interfaces#
One of the goals of pyfingerd was to be able to play a fiction and present scripted fake data.
Picture a scene in a theater. On this scene, you can distinctly see actions happening, making the scene go from one state to the other. Fictional interfaces in pyfingerd function in the same way.
The interface managing the scene is the
pyfingerd.fiction.FingerFictionInterface.
It starts with an empty scene, i.e. no users and no sessions.
From there, two things can happen:
One or more actions can be applied to the scene to make it evolve, using
pyfingerd.fiction.FingerFictionInterface.apply().The scene can be reset to the initial state (no users, no sessions); for example, this can happen when a scene repeats itself or starts a completely different story. This is accomplished by using
pyfingerd.fiction.FingerFictionInterface.reset().
This base class doesn’t do anything by itself, it is a canvas which other classes can subclass to manage the scene by calling these two methods.
Note that any class subclassing the fiction interface can also make the
server shut down by simply exiting using exit(0).
For example, a story could include the server itself, with a technician
making the server crash at some point.
Scenario interface#
One of the applications of the fiction interface is the scenario interface. The idea is to make use of a scenario, i.e. a set of actions accompanied by the ending type and time.
This application is implemented using the
pyfingerd.fiction.FingerScenarioInterface class.
This function has a function that gets executed every second that
updates the scene according to the scenario.
See Scenarios and actions for more information.
Live interface#
Another potential application of the fiction interface would be to read the actions from a live source, e.g. by having an intermediate server listening on localhost for scripts to push actions through HTTP POST requests and making them available for the finger server to pull.
Warning
Note that this usage is not yet implemented.