Tornado Web Server 2.0 released

The Tornado project developers have announced the release of version 2.0 of their open source web server. The Python-based, non-blocking web server framework was first released as open source in September 2009 by Facebook, following its acquisition of FriendFeed.

Tornado 2.0 now supports Python 3.2. The default AsyncHTTPClient is now based on simple_httpclient rather than the curl_httpclient, though this is still available. A number of new directives have been added to the templating language to control escaping behaviour, generate unescaped output and call modules.

The developers note that version 2.0 introduces several potentially backwards-incompatible changes – such as turning on automatic escaping of template output by default – and applications will need to adapt their templates to work correctly. Users upgrading from Tornado 1.x are advised to read the "Backwards compatibility" section of the release notes before updating and, because the Python 3 compatibility involved many changes throughout the codebase, they should test their applications "more thoroughly than usual" when upgrading.

Further information about the major update can be found in the release notes. Tornado 2.0 is available to download (direct download) from the project's site and documentation is provided. Hosted on GitHub, Tornado source code is released under version 2.0 of the Apache License.

(crve)