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When to use Tornado, when to use Twisted / Cyclone / GEvent / other [closed]

Which of these frameworks / libraries would be the best choise for building modern multiuser web application? I would love to have an asynchronous webserver which will allow me to scale easly. What solution will give the best performance / scalability / most useful framework (in terms of easy of use and easy of developing)?

It would be great if it will provide good functionality (websockets, rpc, streaming, etc).

What are the pros and cons of each solution?

Differences between node.js and Tornado

Besides the fact that node.js is written in JS and Tornado in Python, what are some of the differences between the two? They're both non-blocking asynchronous web servers, right? Why choose one over the other besides the language?

When and how to use Tornado? When is it useless?

Ok, Tornado is non-blocking and quite fast and it can handle a lot of standing requests easily.

But I guess it's not a silver bullet and if we just blindly run Django-based or any other site with Tornado it won't give any performance boost.

I couldn't find comprehensive explanation of this, so I'm asking it here:

• When should Tornado be used?
• When is it useless?
• When using it, what should be taken into account?
• How can we make inefficient site using Tornado?
• There is a server and a webframework. When should we use framework and when can we replace it with other one?

How do you *properly* query Redis from Tornado?

I'm curious what the recommended method of querying Redis (or any DB for that matter) is from Tornado.

I've seen some examples like https://gist.github.com/357306 but they all appear to be using blocking calls to redis.

My understanding is that to avoid grinding Tornado to a halt, I need to be using non-blocking DB libraries like the ones developed for Twisted.

Am I wrong? How is this supposed to be done?

Is JSON Hijacking still an issue in modern browsers?

I am using Backbone.js and the Tornado web server. The standard behavior for receiving collection data in Backbone is to send as a JSON Array.

On the other hand, Tornado's standard behavior is to not allow JSON Array's due to the following vulnerability:

http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/20/anatomy-of-a-subtle-json-vulnerability.aspx

A related one is: http://haacked.com/archive/2009/06/25/json-hijacking.aspx

It feels more natural for me to not have to wrap up my JSON in an object when it really is a list of objects.

I was unable to reproduce these attacks in modern browsers (i.e. current Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE9). At the same time I was unable to confirm anywhere that modern browsers had addressed these issues.

To ensure that I am not mislead by any possible poor programming-skills nor poor googling-skills:

Are these JSON Hijacking attacks still an issue today in modern browsers?

(Note: Sorry for the possible duplicate to: Is it possible to do 'JSON hijacking' on modern browser? but since the accepted answer does not seem to answer the question - I thought it was time to ask it again and get some clearer explanations.)

Tornado URL query parameters

I've been playing around with Tornado, and I've written some code that doesn't seem very nice.

I'm writing an app to store recipes as an example. These are my handlers:

handlers = [
    (r"/recipes/", RecipeHandler),
    (r"/recipes", RecipeSearchHandler), #so query params can be used to search
]

This lead me to writing this:

class RecipeHandler(RequestHandler):      
    def get(self):
        self.render('recipes/index.html')

class RecipeSearchHandler(RequestHandler):    
    def get(self):
        try:
            name = self.get_argument('name', True)
            self.write(name)
        # will do some searching
        except AssertionError:
            self.write("no params")
            # will probably redirect to /recipes/

Is there a better way to approach these URLs without a try/except? I'd like /recipes and /recipes/ to show the same thing, whereas /recipes?name=something would do a search, and ideally be a different handler.

Is Tornado really non-blocking?

Tornado advertises itself as "a relatively simple, non-blocking web server framework" and was designed to solve the C10k problem. However, looking at their database wrapper, which wraps MySQLdb, I came across the following piece of code:

def _execute(self, cursor, query, parameters):
    try:
        return cursor.execute(query, parameters)
    except OperationalError:
        logging.error("Error connecting to MySQL on %s", self.host)
        self.close()
        raise

As far as I know calls to the MySQLdb, which is built on top of libmysqlclient, are blocking.

Am I right in thinking that a long-running query would render the entire Tornado server unresponsive until it finishes or is there magic on the code?

python Socket.IO client for sending broadcast messages to TornadIO2 server

I am building a realtime web application. I want to be able to send broadcast messages from the server-side implementation of my python application.

Here is the setup:

• socketio.js on the client-side
• TornadIO2 server as Socket.IO server
• python on the server-side (Django framework)

I can succesfully send socket.io messages from the client to the server. The server handles these and can send a response. In the following i will describe how i did that.

Current Setup and Code

First, we need to define a Connection which handles socket.io events:

class BaseConnection(tornadio2.SocketConnection):
    def on_message(self, message):
        pass

    # will be run if client uses socket.emit('connect', username)
    @event
    def connect(self, username):
        # send answer to client which will be handled by socket.on('log', function)
        self.emit('log', 'hello ' + username)

Starting the server is done by a Django management custom method:

class Command(BaseCommand):
    args = ''
    help = 'Starts the TornadIO2 server for handling socket.io connections'

    def handle(self, *args, **kwargs):
        autoreload.main(self.run, args, kwargs)

    def run(self, *args, **kwargs):
        port = settings.SOCKETIO_PORT

        router = tornadio2.TornadioRouter(BaseConnection)

        application = tornado.web.Application(
            router.urls,
            socket_io_port = port
        )

        print 'Starting socket.io server on port %s' % port
        server = SocketServer(application)

Very well, the server runs now. Let's add the client code:

<script type="text/javascript">    
    var sio = io.connect('localhost:9000');

    sio.on('connect', function(data) {
        console.log('connected');
        sio.emit('connect', '{{ user.username }}');
    });

    sio.on('log', function(data) {
        console.log("log: " + data);
    });
</script>

Obviously, {{ user.username }} will be replaced by the username of the currently logged in user, in this example the username is "alp".

Now, every time the page gets refreshed, the console output is:

connected
log: hello alp

Therefore, invoking messages and sending responses works. But now comes the tricky part.

Problems

The response "hello alp" is sent only to the invoker of the socket.io message. I want to broadcast a message to all connected clients, so that they can be informed in realtime if a new user joins the party (for example in a chat application).

So, here are my questions:

1. How can i send a broadcast message to all connected clients?

2. How can i send a broadcast message to multiple connected clients that are subscribed on a specific channel?

3. How can i send a broadcast message anywhere in my python code (outside of the BaseConnection class)? Would this require some sort of Socket.IO client for python or is this builtin with TornadIO2?

All these broadcasts should be done in a reliable way, so i guess websockets are the best choice. But i am open to all good solutions.

Tornado is "a relatively simple, non-blocking web server framework written in Python"--can somewhat explain what that means?

This is probably a stupid question, but what exactly is a "non-blocking web server"? All web servers are technically non-blocking, arent they? otherwise how could they handle simultaneous connections? Apache2 achieves this using a combination of fork() and pthreads. How exactly are Tornado (and Twisted also) different? Do they just set a bunch of sockets to non-bocking mode, build an FD list (or equivalent), and then loop over that with one big select() sys call?

Where would you use a framework like these, and what advantages can they give you over Apache2 (or other popular servers)? Thanks

what's the tornado ioloop, and tornado's workflow?

i want to know tornado's internal workflow, and have seen this article, it's great, but something i just can't figure out

within the ioloop.py, there is such a function

def add_handler(self, fd, handler, events):
    """Registers the given handler to receive the given events for fd."""
    self._handlers[fd] = handler
    self._impl.register(fd, events | self.ERROR)

so what's this mean? every request will trigger add_handler or it's just triggered once when init?

every socket connect will generate a file descriptor , or it's just generated once?

what's the relationship between ioloop and iostream ?

how does httpserver work with ioloop and iostream ?

is there any workflow chart, so i can see it clearly ?

sorry for these questiones, i just confused

any link, suggestion, tip helps. many thanks :)

Using Tornado, how do I serve static files and serve a favicon.ico from a different directory than the static path?

I am trying this:

favicon_path = '/path/to/favicon.ico'

settings = {'debug': True, 
            'static_path': os.path.join(PATH, 'static')}

handlers = [(r'/', WebHandler),
            (r'/favicon.ico', tornado.web.StaticFileHandler, {'path': favicon_path})]

application = tornado.web.Application(handlers, **settings)
application.listen(port)
tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start()

But it keeps serving the favicon.ico that I have in my static_path (I have two different favicon.ico's in two separate paths, as indicated above, but I want to be able to override the one in the static_path).

Is Tornado a replacement to Django or are they complementary to each other?

I have several questions about Tornado and other web frameworks.

1) Tornado claims to be a webserver (a non-blocking one, therefore much performant), so some people said it does not play the role of django --i.e., they say tornado is not a web framework.

However, it does provide a web framework I think (http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation#main-modules) -- in this way, it seems to replace django as the web development framework.

Is my above understanding correct?

2) Normally, several Tornados are set up behind Nginx. Tomcat is also normally set up behind Apache web server. Can I say Tornado plays exactly same role of Tomcat does for Java web server? If the answer is yes, then Tornado IS a web framework.

3) I read some article saying using Tornado and Django together, such as http://www.jeremybowers.com/blog/post/3/on-deploying-tornado-web-server-framework/, but I read some article online claiming that "if you use Django, then you lose the asynchronous from Tornado", is this true or false? A related question though, if Tornado is itself a web framework as I said in 1), why people bother using Django at all? (to result the plugin?)

Can someone give me a 101 introduction?

The latest recommendation for Comet in Python? [closed]

I'm going to be implementing Comet in Python (even though I hear good things about erlycomet I'm not thrilled about supporting an Erlang-based web server in addition to everything else in our back end). I've found several possibilities:

• Diesel
• Tornado
• Twisted-comet
• Orbited (uses twisted)

(there are also some other choices that interface with Java servers, but I'm not interested in those)

Can somebody make a recommendation among these implementations, considering performance, community, and ease of implementation?

using Flask and Tornado together?

I am a big fan of Flask - in part because it is simple and in part because has a lot of extensions. However, Flask is meant to be used in a WSGI environment, and WSGI is not a non-blocking, so (I believe) it doesn't scale as well as Tornado for certain kinds of applications.

Since each one has an URL dispatcher which will call a function, and both will use Python files (in Django you dont launch the python file but in flask or tornado you do) do does it make sense to have two seperate parts to your website - one part running the non-blocking jobs with Tornado, and the other part written with Flask?

If this is a good idea, how would you go about sharing cookies / sessions between Flask and Tornado? Will I run into issues, since Flask will use it own system and Tornado will use its own system?

Tornado login Examples/Tutorials [closed]

I was wondering if anyone know of any example code or tutorials on implementing a login/signup page in Tornado? Ive seen the examples that come with it, but they seem very facebook/oauth centric.