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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, you'll learn how to use Tornado's 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 Tornado's 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 Tornado's ability to make asynchronous web requests Secure your application against cookie and request vulnerabilities Authenticate with external services, using Tornado's auth module Adopt deployment strategies that help harden your application and increase request throughput
List 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;
About the author
Brendan Berg has more than five years of experience creating web and mobile applications. He has spent the past two years designing and developing cloud infrastructure and APIs as Chief Software Architect of Socialbomb.
Summary
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.
