Tornado in depth

Tornado is a non-blocking light-weight web server and framework. There’s been many introductory talks about it, and it’s time to look deeper into it: not just what Tornado does, but how it does it and what can we learn from it when designing our own concurrent systems.

We’ll cover each topic in two parts: first we’ll see how to use a certain feature in our applications; then, we’ll dig into Tornado’s source code to see how it really works. How much time we’ll spend in the “how to use” will depend on the audience’s knowledge of Tornado.

• Getting Started: quickly get a simple Tornado application up and running. We’ll keep digging into, changing and poking this Application for most of the talk.
• An Application Listens: what an Application is, how does Tornado start it and how does it process its requests.
• Application and IOLoop: we’ll look at how the IOLoop receives the connections from the users and passes them on to the Applications.
• Scheduled Tasks: we’ll see how to schedule tasks and how the IOLoop will run them.
• Generators: we’ll learn to use generators to handle the responses of our asynchronous calls, and how they work with the IOLoop.
• Websockets: how to use them and how they work.
• IOStream: how do Tornado’s non-blocking sockets work.
• Database: how to use non-blocking sockets to connect to a MySQL or MongoDB database.