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The Tornado Web Server
Tornado is a web server built by Friend Feed. The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks (and certainly most Python frameworks) because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services. Tornado is also one of the few web servers built to address the C10K problem . If you have used other python frameworks like web.py or Google's webapp then you are going to feel right at home.
Installation
You will need to install the following before you install Tornado
sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pycurl python-simplejson
Once the installation is complete you can install Tornado by pasting the following into the terminal.
wget http://www.tornadoweb.org/static/tornado-0.2.tar.gz tar xvzf tornado-0.2.tar.gz cd tornado-0.2 python setup.py build sudo python setup.py install
helloworld.py using Tornado
# helloworld.py # Import the tornado framework import tornado.httpserver import tornado.ioloop import tornado.options import tornado.web from tornado.options import define, options # Define a default port for the service to run on define("port", default=8888, help="run on the given port", type=int) class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler): def get(self): self.write("Hello, world") def main(): tornado.options.parse_command_line() application = tornado.web.Application([ (r"/", MainHandler), ]) http_server = tornado.httpserver.HTTPServer(application) http_server.listen(options.port) tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start() if __name__ == "__main__": main()
Run it terminal by issuing the following command
python helloworld.py
or
python helloworld.py --port=8080
If all goes well you can open up a browser and visit http://localhost:8888
Follow up: How to run tornado in production
