Introduction to Tornado

by Michael Dory, Allison Parrish, and Brendan Berg

Tornado is a scalable, non-blocking web server and web application framework written in Python. It is also light-weight to deploy, fun to write for, and incredibly powerful. Tornado was written with performance in mind, aiming to solve the C10k problem, so by design it’s an extremely high-performance framework. It’s also packed with handy tools for dealing with social networks, user authentication, and all sorts of asynchronous fun. In this book, we’ll cover the basics of the Tornado framework, starting with the features that make it so great, and working our way towards some real-life examples. We’ll cover the best practices for implementation and deployment, as well as a sampling of uses for the technology.

Sample code for the book

These are the complete code examples for the chapters in the O'Reilly book of the same name, with complete application examples that you can run on your own. These shouldn't require anything beyond the basic install of Tornado and Python 2.6+, except for the MongoDB examples (which obviously require MongoDB, as well as pymongo).

Contact

If you've got thoughts or questions, hit us up here or on social media at @aparrish, @gnuaesthatic.bsky.social, and @mike_dory, or open a pull request here.