Tornado: FriendFeed's non-blocking Python web server is now open source

How many deployed web apps really use Twisted? There are like 3 web packages in Twisted, most of which are really buggy, and as far as I could tell, barely used (even they acknowledge this, see http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/WebDevelopmentWithTwisted).

When we were developing this, we found that Twisted introduced as many problems as it solved in terms of incomplete features and bugs. The other protocols seem to have more attention than HTTP from what I could tell.

Re: Tornado: FriendFeed's non-blocking Python web server is now open source

#6

Post by fizx » Thu, Sep 10, 2009, 5:57 PM UTC

charlesju wrote: post #3

Is this similar to EventMachine in Ruby?

EM is a general-purpose library for nonblocking IO. Tornado is an HTTP server. In as much as they're both about nonblocking IO, they are similar.

Re: Tornado: FriendFeed's non-blocking Python web server is now open source

#7

Post by tdavis » Thu, Sep 10, 2009, 5:57 PM UTC

This is more of a combination of a web server and a web framework, which is what I find fascinating about it. Twisted has had a web server forever, but despite a significant amount of experience in Twisted Land, I'd never write a full app using it! Add to that the (apparently) standalone low-level modules and we've got some seriously awesome tech that FriendFeed/Facebook have supplied for free.

Thanks a lot, fellas. Asynchronous networking programming in Python is somewhat of a bear so it's really nice to see a tool get released that improves it!

Re: Tornado: FriendFeed's non-blocking Python web server is now open source

#8

Post by auston » Thu, Sep 10, 2009, 6:08 PM UTC

At a first glance, this looks SERIOUSLY awesome!

Re: Tornado: FriendFeed's non-blocking Python web server is now open source

#9

Post by omouse » Thu, Sep 10, 2009, 6:13 PM UTC

Does this implement all of the HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 protocol specs? I'm kinda confused by the code :S

Re: Tornado: FriendFeed's non-blocking Python web server is now open source

#10

Post by abstractbill » Thu, Sep 10, 2009, 6:22 PM UTC

finiteloop wrote: post #5

dlsspy wrote: post #4

I could use this in apps today if it used twisted instead of reinventing it.

How many deployed web apps really use Twisted? There are like 3 web packages in Twisted, most of which are really buggy, and as far as I could tell, barely used (even they acknowledge this, see http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/WebDevelopmentWithTwisted ). When we were developing this, we found that Twisted introduced as many problems as it solved in terms of incomplete features and bugs. The other protocols seem to…

The other protocols seem to have more attention than HTTP from what I could tell.

I'm not sure even that is true. When I used twisted to write the justin.tv chat server (which is essentially an irc server) I gave up on twisted's irc protocol implementation and wound up just using twisted as an I/O layer.