Tornado 2.1 released (opens in new tab)

I've used both Django and Tornado and I vastly prefer Tornado.

Some personal experiences: With Django, I specifically don't like ORM and it's template language. Also, I thought the admin interface would reduce the need to write input UIs, but at the end of the day, it's not that suitable for end-user when you have several end-user roles with different access right patterns.

If you (read: I) are going to replace Django's template language and leave out ORM and admin interface out of Django, Django doesn't really shine anymore and simpler frameworks like Tornado provide cleaner base for your development.

When speed isn't important and you know you want to use a SQL database; then use Django. For everything else, use Tornado. :)

I've noticed that Tornado comes with its own MySQL wrapper, however I'm concerned it might have blocking issues.

Does anyone have experience with using this ?

Also, what do people use for form validation with Tornado ?

I wrote a web service in Tornado around a year ago, pre-1.0. It's a very nice, albeit minimal framework. In terms of comparisons to others:

* it feels easier to scale up than Flask, but that could be my minimal Flask experience showing. Certainly, it is more performant than basic Flask installations and configurations.

* it makes it harder to separate your concerns than, say, Django. I've been working in Django for a long time, and while I have definite issues with the "app"-style packaging (ie. if I add an external forum framework, for instance, I need to munge my "profiles" app to support it), it does feel easier to separate your concerns in Django than in most other frameworks I've used.

* it's fast, and reasonably agnostic - the MySQL DB layer, for instance, can be completely eschewed for something else.

I imagine they've added a lot to it since then, and the service itself isn't something I've looked at for a while (failed startup idea). But from what I used back then, I'd definitely recommend it.

I'm a convert from Twisted.

It is simple enough, the code is clear and small enough to dive into if you have any problems, and it works just great.

I too am in the Tornado's camp. I love its simplicity. It has decent documentation. And if there's something you don't understand you just peek at the source. I tend to write my code independent of tornado, so if the need arises I can switch to a different framework.

Easy to get started, easy to deploy, pythonic/magic-free code, responsive maintainer.

tornado.database has no real ties to the rest of the system; you can (and I usually do) use SQLAlchemy or another database layer instead. You can also call another template engine if you prefer, but you're sort of stuck with the url routing.

If you bring in tons of third party code you end up with a mess like Pylons. For people new to a framework, it's a pain to learn that when a problem arises you need to go look up the docs for a separate framework.

I don't get it. Your example is what Tornado looks like::

  class LoginHandler(RequestHandler):
      def get(self):
          self.render('login.html')
      def post(self):
          self.set_secure_cookie(self.get_argument('username'))
        self.redirect('/')

Having one class per URL is very common and perhaps it's more than a decade of Python web programming but I like that. Makes for neat code.

Im a PHP developer who uses Tornado and I recently wrote a PHP micro framework that works like tornado's controllers where rest verbs were the only publicly (uri) accessible methods

It all boils down to what you prefer. They're both relatively mature software packages that are being used by tons in production.

Whichever you choose, you may find that http://socket.io/ saves you some time by inventing various wheels you may have needed to reinvent (for use with tornado, see the tornadio project).