Tornado is an open source Python web framework, scalable web server, and asynchronous networking library which has been in development from 2009.
By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado specializes in handling thousands of simultaneous connections and real-time services. This makes it a good fit for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that need a long-lived connection to each user.
The framework is designed to be simple, like web.py or Bottle, without some of the more complex configuration of web frameworks like Django. A Tornado web application generally consists of one or more ‘.RequestHandler’ subclasses, an ‘.Application’ object which routes incoming requests to handlers, and a ”main()” function to start the server.
Tornado has four main components:
- Web framework.
- Client- and server-side implementations of HTTP – a non-blocking, single-threaded TCP server.
- Asynchronous networking library including the classes IOLoop and IOStream, which serve as the building blocks for the HTTP components and can also be used to implement other protocols.
- IOLoop – an I/O event loop for non-blocking sockets. In addition to I/O events, IOLoop can also schedule time-based events.
- IOStream – provides utility classes to write to and read from non-blocking files and sockets.
- Coroutine library (tornado.gen) – allows asynchronous code to be written in a more straightforward way than chaining callbacks.
Features include:
- Good performance.
- To minimize the cost of concurrent connections, Tornado uses a single-threaded event loop. This means that all application code should aim to be asynchronous and non-blocking because only one operation can be active at a time.
- Supports non-blocking, asynchronous web / networking application development.
- Built-in multi-process mode to start several processes simultaneously.
- Native Websocket Support
- Support for social logins.
- Built in options/config file utilities.
- Simple, fast, and flexible templating language. Tornado can also be used with any other Python template language. Tornado templates are translated directly to Python.
- Routing.
- Supplied with many useful compact utilities that make writing Python code fun.
- Libraries based on asyncio can be mixed relatively seamlessly with those using Tornado.
- Cookie utilities.
- Request parsing.
- Supports Python 2.7.9+ and 3.4+.
- Offers an alternative to the Python Web Server Gateway.
Website: www.tornadoweb.org
Support: GitHub, Wiki, Mailing List (Announcement)
Developer: The Tornado Authors
License: Apache License 2.0
Tornado is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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