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Comment by bootload | Hacker News Reader

best thing to come out of friendfeed, Tornado. I remember asking Bret Taylor on his blog [0] when he gave a Tornado example if he'd ever release it. A bit of time went by, then he did. [1] Thanks Bret.

[0] http://backchannel.org/blog/tornado

[1] https://friendfeed.com/friendfeed-news/9b8fbaed/technology-b...

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Goddamn Tornado was/is the best Python HTTP server ever. Asides from the wide utility library of non-blocking IO (years before node got popular) it had Sinatra-style class based routing that was far simpler than django's bizarre route.as_route() stuff.

A friend once said the worst thing about Tornado was how little publicity it got.

Why all the "was/is" in this subthread? Tornado's not going anywhere.

Only reason I wrote 'is/was' because it's been a couple of years since I used Tornado and other Python HTTP servers might have gotten better. I hack node all day now.

What did you think about Twisted?

Twisted was focused on general sockets apps rather than HTTP, and for some reason had code written using a styleguide different from the rest of the Python ecosystem.

Tornado OTOH was very HTTP focused. It also had a bunch of useful examples maintained in the actual repo so they were always up to date.

Agreed, Tornado was/is awesome. Is it still being used in new projects? I somewhat prefer it to node/etc for that style of app, but I would probably still choose JS for real-time web nowadays just because of the mindshare/community around it. I would love it if there was a thriving Tornado community somewhere that I'd missed.

We use it for quite a bit at my job (for everything really). Mostly, I think due to familiarity.

I enjoy working with it (and I've grown to really enjoy python due to my time using it), and it's possible to build a server that uses generators pretty easily. The only problem is that you have to be really watchful for blocking calls mucking the whole thing up.

For a long time, I really would have rather used node, but now, I'm ok with using python. I pushed us into a micro service style architecture, so one day, it's feasible to upgrade different parts of the stack with different technologies.

Will Tornado continue to be maintained? There are still a lot of commits being made: https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/commits/master

Tornado has a BDFL (Ben Darnell) who continues to maintain it, and hasn't been a part of facebook/friendfeed for some time now.

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