Tornado is a scalable, non-blocking web server and web application framework written in Python. It is also light-weight to deploy, fun to write for, and incredibly powerful. Tornado was written with performance in mind, aiming to solve the C10k problem, so by design it's an extremely high-performance framework. It's also packed with handy tools for dealing with social networks, user authentication, and all sorts of asynchronous fun. In this book, we'll cover the basics of the Tornado framework, starting with the features that make it so great, and working our way towards some real-life examples. We'll cover the best practices for implementation and deployment, as well as a sampling of uses for the technology.