About
Cyclone is a low-level network toolkit, which provides support for HTTP 1.1 in an API very similar to the one implemented by the Tornado web server - which was developed by FriendFeed and later released as open source / free software by Facebook.
Key differences between Cyclone and Tornado
- Cyclone is based on Twisted, hence it may be used as a webservice protocol for interconnection with any other protocol implemented in Twisted.
- Localization is based upon the standard Gettext instead of the CSV implementation in the original Tornado. Moreover, it supports pluralization exactly like Tornado does.
- It ships with an asynchronous HTTP client based on TwistedWeb, however, it's fully compatible with one provided by Tornado - which is based on PyCurl. (The HTTP server code is NOT based on TwistedWeb, for several reasons)
- Native support for XMLRPC and JsonRPC. (see the rpc demo)
- WebSocket protocol class is just like any other Twisted Protocol (i.e.: LineReceiver; see the websocket demo)
- Support for sending e-mail based on Twisted Mail, with authentication and TLS, plus an easy way to create plain text or HTML messages, and attachments. (see the e-mail demo)
- Built-in support for Redis, based on txredisapi. We usually need an in-memory caching server like memcache for web applications. However, we prefer redis over memcache because it supports more operations like pubsub, various data types like sets, hashes (python dict), and persistent storage. See the redis demo for details.
- Support for HTTP Authentication. See the authentication demo for details
Advantages of being a Twisted Protocol
- Easy deployment of applications, using twistd.
- RDBM support via: twisted.enterprise.adbapi.
- NoSQL support for MongoDB (TxMongo) and Redis (TxRedisAPI).
- May combine many more functionality within the webserver: sending emails, communicating with message brokers, etc...
- Integrates on existing twisted based projects easily
- Leverages all Twisted protocols