Introduction to Tornado
So I did an introduction to Tornado talk at the recent Austin Web Python Users' Group (or AWPUG as it is better known). It was a lot more fun for me than I bet it was for those who had to hear me yammer on. Thankfully, Travis Swicegood followed with an excellent talk on Class-based views in Django 1.3.
Someone had a Flip video camera going, so the intarweb may soon be blasted with my incomprehensible jabbering.
Anyway, here are the slides from my talk:
Also, I made a fake site for people to see how one might construct an async API-dependent website in Tornado pretty quickly. It depends on Torn, a project a few of us are working on which shamelessly apes a subset of django-admin.py, just for Tornado sites.
As an aside, someone asked me a question about why you would pick Tornado over gevent, when gevent will let you use any WSGI framework on top of magically asynchronous sockets. I mumbled something about "explicit versus implicit" and the Zen of Python, but in retrospect I totally bombed that question.
While the explicit nature of Tornado IS awesome, as is the performance of epoll, etc., Tornado is genius in the fact that it somehow manages to provide very low-level, simple access to all parts of the HTTP request-response cycle and yet simultaneously includes most helpers you might need for building a slick web application. By overwriting a few methods, I can create a custom authentication system in a few lines, using whatever data backend I choose.
You can do the same with Django, but the difference is that Django's shortcuts tend to make you follow Django conventions. Tornado provides the tools to easily create your own. Tie that in with slick async single-sign-on libraries for Twitter, Facebook, Google, OAuth, etc. and that's just one simple example of one of Tornado's many benefits. Personally, I just tend to work faster in Tornado, with more flexibility.
Anyway, that's what I should have said. :)
