If you are a real time, streaming content provider such as real time web services, then Facebook latest open source “Tornado” is right platform for you and FriendFeed is based on Tornado. Basically what it does it let you publish your content in real time to subscribers, since subscribers are connected to FriendFeed all the time.
FriendFeed is social feed aggregator based on Open Source Web server framework Called “Tornado” and is a very appealing framework for web development community. Since many web guru’s are predicting that real time web is future for everyone.
Tornado itself as already described open source framework, written in Python, a high level programming language, which makes it simpler for coders and developers easier to understand the foundations and build their applications upon it very easily. Python is a widely adopted programming language. Tornado is a custom framework built from scratch, instead of building the framework on already available frameworks like Django, because of performance and highly demanding feature set. Thus making it yet another open web framework for rapid web application development which is REAL time. Amongst the highlighted features, performance is a key one, along with Real time services which many competitive platforms like web.py and Google apps and frameworks like Django. Tornado provides all the building blocks required to build a web application and supports integration with other frameworks as well.
One of the applications could be to go in direction of RSSCloud, which is getting good momentum and recently WordPress enabled RSSCloud for all its hosted blogs. Other places where I can think of using this framework is where there is a problem of synching two sides and long polling times are involved, and the developers want to keep their memory footprint as low as possible and use less locked resources and avoid garbage cleaning etc.
On the other side of the fence, in Microsoft .NET world things have been progressing in this side already, Microsoft has officially introduced MVC framework on top of .net framework 3.5, and with WCF ( Windows communication foundation ) stack getting more powerful building real time web applications which can be build rapidly is piece of cake. This though still comes at price of using Microsoft licenses for windows hosting etc, but Microsoft’s offerings are quite lucrative for enterprises which have significant investments in enterprise applications.
Facebook is really trying to take over the only but small competitor of it in the area of real time web , yes its Twitter, with its latest acquisition of FriendFeed. Facebook has already displayed its intentions of using FriendFeed real time functionality in its instant messaging chat client.
More technical details and programming snippets about tornado can be found here
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Article by Muzzammil Waheed
Founder of BiGGTech.com, tech enthusiast, develops in Microsoft technologies with interests in technology, science and gadgets