Voting Tornado

James Alexander

Our Story Begins

Async Framework

  • Originally Developed by Friend Feed
  • Scale to Thousands of connections
  • Designed for Long Polling and Web Sockets

Four Major Parts

  • Web Framework - RequestHandler
  • Client / Server Http Implementations (HTTPServer, AsyncHTTPClient)
  • IOLoop and IOStream - Building Blocks for HTTP and other protocols
  • Coroutine Library - tornado.gen

Hello World

import tornado.ioloop
import tornado.web

class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write("Hello, world")

def make_app():
    return tornado.web.Application([
        (r"/", MainHandler),
    ])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = make_app()
    app.listen(8888)
    tornado.ioloop.IOLoop.current().start()

Blocking

Occurs when waiting for something to happen. Typically network i/o, disk i/o, mutexes, etc.

Asynchronous

  • Returns before it is finished
  • Callback argument
  • Return a placeholder (Future, Promise, Deferred)
  • Deliver to a queue
  • Callback registry (e.g. POSIX signals)

Blocking

from tornado.httpclient import HTTPClient

def synchronous_fetch(url):
    http_client = HTTPClient()
    response = http_client.fetch(url)
    return response.body

Call Back

from tornado.httpclient import AsyncHTTPClient

def asynchronous_fetch(url, callback):
    http_client = AsyncHTTPClient()
    def handle_response(response):
        callback(response.body)
    http_client.fetch(url, callback=handle_response)

Future

from tornado.concurrent import Future

def async_fetch_future(url):
    http_client = AsyncHTTPClient()
    my_future = Future()
    fetch_future = http_client.fetch(url)
    fetch_future.add_done_callback(
        lambda f: my_future.set_result(f.result()))
    return my_future

Coroutine

from tornado import gen

@gen.coroutine
def fetch_coroutine(url):
    http_client = AsyncHTTPClient()
    response = yield http_client.fetch(url)
    # In Python versions prior to 3.3, returning a value from
    # a generator is not allowed and you must use
    #   raise gen.Return(response.body)
    # instead. The coroutine catches the 'Return'
    # exception and treats it like a return value
    return response.body

Python 3.5

async def fetch_coroutine(url):
    http_client = AsyncHTTPClient()
    response = await http_client.fetch(url)
    return response.body

Web App Structure

  1. One or more RequestHandler Objects
  2. A main() method initializing an Application Object

The Application Object holds global configuration, and maps routes to RequestHandlers

Subclassing RequestHandler

class MyFormHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.write('<html><body><form action="/myform" method="POST">'
                   '<input type="text" name="message">'
                   '<input type="submit" value="Submit">'
                   '</form></body></html>')

    def post(self):
        self.set_header("Content-Type", "text/plain")
        self.write("You wrote " + self.get_body_argument("message"))

Error Handling

  • Tornado will call RequestHandler.write_error to allow you to generate a custom error page. 
  • Most likely implement this in a BaseRequestHandler to handle for all RequestHandler classes

Templates

<html>
   <head>
      <title>{{ title }}</title>
   </head>
   <body>
     <ul>
       {% for item in items %}
         <li>{{ escape(item) }}</li>
       {% end %}
     </ul>
   </body>
 </html>
class MainHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        items = ["Item 1", "Item 2", "Item 3"]
        self.render("template.html", title="My title", items=items)

UI Modules

class Entry(tornado.web.UIModule):
    def render(self, entry, show_comments=False):
        return self.render_string(
            "module-entry.html", entry=entry, show_comments=show_comments)
from . import uimodules

settings = {
    "ui_modules": uimodules,
}
application = tornado.web.Application([
    (r"/", HomeHandler),
    (r"/entry/([0-9]+)", EntryHandler),
], **settings)
{% for entry in entries %}
  {% module Entry(entry) %}
{% end %}

Internationalization

<html>
   <head>
      <title>FriendFeed - {{ _("Sign in") }}</title>
   </head>
   <body>
     <form action="{{ request.path }}" method="post">
       <div>{{ _("Username") }} <input type="text" name="username"/></div>
       <div>{{ _("Password") }} <input type="password" name="password"/></div>
       <div><input type="submit" value="{{ _("Sign in") }}"/></div>
       {% module xsrf_form_html() %}
     </form>
   </body>
 </html>
_("A person liked this", "%(num)d people liked this",
  len(people)) % {"num": len(people)}

Authentication

class GoogleOAuth2LoginHandler(tornado.web.RequestHandler,
                               tornado.auth.GoogleOAuth2Mixin):
    @tornado.gen.coroutine
    def get(self):
        if self.get_argument('code', False):
            user = yield self.get_authenticated_user(
                redirect_uri='http://your.site.com/auth/google',
                code=self.get_argument('code'))
            # Save the user with e.g. set_secure_cookie
        else:
            yield self.authorize_redirect(
                redirect_uri='http://your.site.com/auth/google',
                client_id=self.settings['google_oauth']['key'],
                scope=['profile', 'email'],
                response_type='code',
                extra_params={'approval_prompt': 'auto'})
class MainHandler(BaseHandler):
    @tornado.web.authenticated
    def get(self):
        name = tornado.escape.xhtml_escape(self.current_user)
        self.write("Hello, " + name)

Voting Tornado

Demo

Benefits of Tornado

  • Designed for Async, long-lived connections
  • Native Coroutines with Python 3.5 simplify the call-back style of programming
  • RequestHandler hierarchy for common request needs

FIN

Contact

  • jamesralexander.com
  • @yanigisawa
  • github.com/yanigisawa

Voting Tornado

By James Alexander

Voting Tornado

  • 1,478

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