(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Social media community Facebook revealed on Thursday via its Developer’s blog it is releasing an open source, web server framework designed for developers to create applications that enable users to post status updates in real time.
Entitled Tornado, the open source web server technology is written in the Python language, and has the ability to process thousands of simultaneous connections.
In the blog, David Recordon, Facebook’s open programs manager writes: “Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed’s real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain. While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python… it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic.”
Recordon also noted that the company chose to make the technology open source as “a way to increase innovation across the Web”.
Real-time updates has been recently popularized by microblogging site Twitter, and Facebook has been hoping to follow suit with this trend.
In April, Facebook released its open stream application programming interface, which lets developers build applications that access these Facebook notifications and help users manage them.
Bret Taylor, director of products at Facebook, delves more into the technical details about Tornado on his blog.
Tornado’s source code is now available on GitHub, as well as its documentation and a developer mailing list.
