I’m playing with 2 different project ideas right now. One it was a given I’d go with Tornado. It’s basically a very similar implementation to what I’m doing with unscatter.com. The other though is a chat server, and I really thought I’d try some other technologies.

I had a few other technologies I want to play with. Google Go, Erlang and Brubeck were topping the list. However, life is busy for me right now. My job has a lot going on. I have a family, with 2 very young kids. It’s that time of the year where HOV traffic is actually kind of light, so my commutes aren’t as long. Holidays are coming up…

So, I’m back to using Tornado for everything. There are 2 main reasons why.

1) I know Tornado. When you use a technology long enough, it’s easier to just stick with it.

2) Tornado is extremely quick to get started with on a new machine. Much easier than just about anything else.

It’s like this.

If you’re developing on Linux or a Mac, most likely you have Python install.

So, here’s a quick script to get a Tornado project going.

mkdir ~/git
cd git
git clone https://github.com/facebook/tornado.git
mkdir my_app
cp -Rp tornado/tornado my_app/
cd my_app
vi my_app.py
# start coding

No make. No installing extra support libraries. Just get tornado, start coding.