Synopses & Reviews
Walk through the basics of Tornado, the high-performance web server known for its speed, simplicity, and scalability on projects large and small. With this hands-on guide, youll learn how to use Tornados acclaimed features by working with several example applications. You also get best practices for using Tornado in the real world.
Are you interested in creating a scalable social application, real-time analytics engine, or RESTful API—all with the power and simplicity of Python? This book shows you why Tornado is fantastic choice for writing powerful applications that are simple to create, extend, and deploy.
- Learn how to use Tornados lightweight and flexible templating language
- Extend templates to repurpose headers, footers, layout grids, and other content
- Use persistent storage like MongoDB to store, serve, and edit dynamic content
- Explore Tornados ability to make asynchronous web requests
- Secure your application against cookie and request vulnerabilities
- Authenticate with external services, using Tornados auth module
- Adopt deployment strategies that help harden your application and increase request throughput
Synopsis
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 its an extremely high-performance framework. Its also packed with handy tools for dealing with social networks, user authentication, and all sorts of asynchronous fun. In this book, well 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. Well cover the best practices for implementation and deployment, as well as a sampling of uses for the technology.
About the Author
Michael Dory has spent the last decade studying the ways people communicate, and working to make their conversations better. As the co-founder and CTO of the social technology agency Socialbomb, hes worked with brands, agencies, and startups to build social applications and platforms that connect users with their friends, their devices, and the world around them.
Allison Parrish is an artist and programmer, currently residing in Brooklyn. She has 10 years of professional programming experience, with an emphasis on programming for the Web.
Brendan Berg has over five years of professional experience developing web and mobile applications. Previously, he developed mobile applications, cloud infrastructure, and APIs as Chief Software Architect at Socialbomb. Now hes focusing on creating software for the freelance ecosystem as the co-founder and CTO of Wurk Happy.
Table of Contents
Preface; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1: Introduction; 1.1 What Is Tornado?; 1.2 Simple Web Services; Chapter 2: Forms and Templates; 2.1 Simple Example: Poem Maker Pro; 2.2 Template Syntax; 2.3 Complete Example: The Alpha Munger; Chapter 3: Extending Templates; 3.1 Blocks and Substitutions; 3.2 UI Modules; 3.3 Summing Up; Chapter 4: Databases; 4.1 Basic MongoDB Operations with PyMongo; 4.2 A Simple Persistent Web Service; 4.3 Burt's Books; 4.4 MongoDB: Next Steps; Chapter 5: Asynchronous Web Services; 5.1 Asynchronous Web Requests; 5.2 Long Polling with Tornado; 5.3 WebSockets with Tornado; Chapter 6: Writing Secure Applications; 6.1 Cookie Vulnerabilities; 6.2 Request Vulnerabilities; 6.3 User Authentication; 6.4 Summing up; Chapter 7: Authenticating with External Services; 7.1 The Tornado auth Module; 7.2 Example: Sign in With Twitter; 7.3 Example: Facebook Authentication and the Graph API; Chapter 8: Deploying Tornado; 8.1 Reasons for Running Multiple Tornado Instances; 8.2 Using Nginx as a Reverse Proxy; 8.3 Using Supervisor to Manage Tornado Processes;