We've covered a lot of ground in this chapter. While we don't know every detail of Storm, we've seen how to construct a topology with multiple components and send data between them.
The Python code for the topology is quite short—only about 75 lines in all. This makes a nice example, but really, it's just a little too short. When you start writing your own topologies, things probably won't work perfectly the first time. New code usually has bugs, and may even crash sometimes. To get things working correctly, you'll need to know what's happening in the topology, especially when there are problems. As you work on fixing problems, you'll be running the same topology over and over, and the 30-second startup time for a topology can seem like eternity.