Twisted and Tornado

If you are building microservices where increasing the number of concurrent requests you can hold is important, it's tempting to drop the WSGI standard, and just use an asynchronous framework like Tornado (http://www.tornadoweb.org/) or Twisted (https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/).

Twisted has been around for ages. To implement the same microservices, you need to write a slightly more verbose code like this:

    import time  
    import json
    from twisted.web import server, resource 
    from twisted.internet import reactor, endpoints 
 
    class Simple(resource.Resource): 
        isLeaf = True 
        def render_GET(self, request): 
            request.responseHeaders.addRawHeader(b"content-type", 
                                                 b"application/json") 
            return bytes(json.dumps({'time': time.time()}), 'utf8') 
 
        site = server.Site(Simple()) 
        endpoint = endpoints.TCP4ServerEndpoint(reactor, 8080) 
        endpoint.listen(site) 
        reactor.run() 

While Twisted is an extremely robust and efficient framework, it suffers from a few problems when building HTTP microservices, which are as follows:

• You need to implement each endpoint in your microservice with a class derived from a Resource class, and that implements each supported method. For a few simple APIs, it adds a lot of boilerplate code.
• Twisted code can be hard to understand and debug due to its asynchronous nature.
• It's easy to fall into callback hell when you chain too many functions that get triggered successively one after the other--and the code can get messy.
• Properly testing your Twisted application is hard, and you have to use a Twisted-specific unit testing model.

Tornado is based on a similar model, but does a better job in some areas. It has a lighter routing system, and does everything possible to make the code closer to plain Python. Tornado also uses a callback model, so debugging can be hard.

But both frameworks are working hard at bridging the gap to rely on the new async features introduced in Python 3.