Compare Ruby on Rails vs. Tornado Web Server

In the last twenty years, Rails has propelled numerous businesses to reach millions of users and achieve valuations in the billions. More than six thousand contributors have written code for Rails, while countless others have played vital roles in community engagement through advocacy, documentation, and reporting issues. It handles a variety of tasks such as rendering HTML templates, updating databases, managing email communications, maintaining real-time pages with WebSockets, queuing jobs for asynchronous execution, and storing uploads in the cloud, all while ensuring robust security against common vulnerabilities. Databases become dynamic with business logic encapsulated in intricate objects, which model associations between tables, trigger callbacks upon saving, encrypt sensitive information effortlessly, and articulate SQL queries in a clear manner. Controllers serve as the bridge between the domain model and the web, processing incoming parameters, managing caching headers, and rendering templates, ultimately responding with either HTML or JSON formats. This seamless integration of features makes Rails a powerful framework for modern web development.

Tornado is a web framework for Python that also serves as an asynchronous networking library, initially created at FriendFeed. Utilizing non-blocking network I/O, it has the capability to manage tens of thousands of simultaneous connections, making it particularly suited for applications requiring long-lived user connections, such as long polling and WebSockets. Unlike most Python web frameworks, Tornado does not follow the WSGI standard and is primarily operated with a single thread per process. Although the tornado.wsgi module offers some WSGI compatibility, it is not the main focus of development, and developers are encouraged to utilize Tornado’s own interfaces, like tornado.web, for building applications. It is important to note that Tornado code is generally not designed to be thread-safe. Since version 5.0, Tornado has been integrated with Python's standard library asyncio module, sharing the same default event loop. This integration allows for seamless mixing of libraries that are built for asyncio with Tornado, enhancing its versatility and functionality. As a result, developers can create highly efficient applications that leverage both Tornado's strengths and asyncio's capabilities.