Event-driven webserver Tornado is now open source »

FriendFeed has released Tornado, a Python non-blocking event-driven webserver and framework, as open source.

The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks (and certainly most Python frameworks) because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services. We built the web server specifically to handle FriendFeed’s real-time features — every active user maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers.