Compare Tornado and web2py

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user. It is great for use cases that are I/O intensive (e.g., proxies) but not ideal for compute-intensive use cases.

web2py was originally designed as a teaching tool, but it gained adoption outside of the academic world. It is a full-stack framework containing all the components needed to build fully functional web applications using the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern. Inspired by the Ruby on Rails and Django. It is not very popular right now but was ranked amongst top Python web frameworks in 2011.

Let's see how Tornado and web2py compare on various factors and features and which to choose when.

Tornado

web2py

Overall

Type

Type

Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, which does non-blocking I/O.

Type

Python full-stack for building web applications.

Author

Author

Ben Darnell

Author

Massimo Di Pierro

Release Date

Release Date

2009

Release Date

2007

License

License

Apache License

License

GNU Lesser General Public License version 3 (LGPLv3)

Website

Website

www.tornadoweb.org

Website

www.web2py.com

Adoption and Ease of Use

Popularity [?]

Used by 145,000 projects.

Popularity [?]

Used by 36 projects.

Used by

Used by

FriendFeed, Turntable.fm, Fantamaster.it

Used by

Not in use at any large company.

Jobs [?]

Jobs [?]

300 job openings which list Tornado as a requirement.

Jobs [?]

8 job openings which list web2py as a requirement.

Performance [?]

Performance [?]

Excellent performance.

Performance [?]

Web2py takes a unique approach where models and controllers are executed in a single global environment, which is initialized at each HTTP request. While there are pros to this approach, such as developers never having to worry about cleaning up or avoid conflict between requests, the major disadvantage is that the code is models is executed with every request which carries a performance penalty.

Flexibility

Flexibility

Tornado is simple and flexible.

Flexibility

Not as flexible as microframeworks, but doesn't always get in the way.

Ease of Learning

Ease of Learning

Tornado is not difficult to learn if the user is familiar with asynchronous and non-blocking I/O. The online resources, courses, and tutorials are not as plentiful compared to Flask or Django.

Ease of Learning

Limited online tutorials and resources, and many are several years old. The best resource for learning is web2py author's own "web2py Complete Reference Manual", which seems to be written in 2013.

Database Support

RDBMS Support

RDBMS Support

Through Plugins or Extensions

Being an asynchronous framework, Tornado doesn't play well with ORM frameworks. See this stackoverflow answer for more details. It doesn't come with a built-in ORM framework, but 3rd party libraries that can be used. Such as tornado-sqlalchemy, Tornado-MySQL (experimental), etc.

RDBMS Support

Built-in

Ships with a Database Abstraction Layer (DAL) which supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and many other relational databases.

NoSQL Support

NoSQL Support

No built-in support for NoSQL databases, but 3rd party libraries support asynchronous, non-blocking access. Motor is one such library from the makers of MongoDB. However, a lot of client libraries like DynamoDB appear to have been deprecated or not actively maintained.

NoSQL Support

No built-in support. Very limited support for NoSQL databases. Currently, it only supports Google Datastore on the Google App Engine.

Web & Core Features

Admin Dashboard

Admin Dashboard

No or Limited Support

No built-in admin panel. No well-known 3rd party tools either.

Admin Dashboard

Built-in

Yes ships with a built-in admin panel.

REST Support

REST Support

No built-in support for REST API, but users can implement REST APIs manually.

REST Support

Has some support.

Security

Security

Built-in security mechanisms such as secure cookies, XSRF, DNS Rebinding and etc. Has been used in production for many years so security is generally decent.

Security

Built-in protection against input injections, XSS, and common vulnerabilities. Read more here. It has known security vulnerabilities. Please see list here.

Templating Library

Templating Library

Tornado uses custom templating library out of the box.

Templating Library

Uses custom web2py templating language out of the box.

Web Forms

Web Forms

No built-in support.

Web Forms

Built-in support. Read more here.

Authentication

Authentication

Provides user authentication and also supports 3rd party authentication and authorization systems like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Authentication

Includes a Role Based Access Control mechanism (RBAC), which is sufficient for many use cases.

Testing

Testing

Built-in support using Python's unittest framework.

Testing

Can be done using Python's unittest framework or using the doctest.

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