ReadWriteWeb

Greplin, the company behind the universal search tool we covered last year, has open-sourced several tools for Tornado and Twisted, such as Tornado clients for sending e-mail with Amazon SES and SendGrid.

Tornado is the non-blocking Web server built with Python by FriendFeed, and Twited is a Python-based event-driven networking engine.

Want to turn your website into a storm of real-time user activity? Another way to do so has just arrived. The real-time web framework called Tornado, which Facebook open sourced last Fall, has just released version 1.0.

Tornado is a real-time web server built in Python that supports tens of thousands of continuous connections and thus the long-polling method of real-time data delivery. It is the core of FriendFeed, a technically innovative service built by two ex-Googlers and leaders in the real-time web community, which was acquired by Facebook in August, 2009. Built largely by the man who is now CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor, this first version of Tornado was taken across the finish line by another heavy hitter: Ben Darnell of Thing Labs.

The real-time web was hot this year and it's likely to become a standard expectation on sites all around the world next year. We've tracked this trend extensively with a face-to-face summit of industry leaders and an 84-page research report on The Real-Time Web and Its Future.

Who were the big movers and shakers in real time this year? Check out our list of the top 10 below and let us know if there are any important ones we missed.

Facebook just announced that it has released Tornado, the real-time web framework that powers FriendFeed, as open source code. According to Facebook's David Recordon, Tornado is one of the core infrastructure pieces that power FriendFeed's real-time functionality. The framework, according to Recordon, is similar to other Python frameworks like Google's webapp or web.py, but is faster and able to handle more simultaneous traffic than its competitors. On his personal blog, Bret Taylor, one of the co-founders of FriendFeed, explains the technical details behind Tornado in more detail.

If you sell SaaS, security is the big concern you have to deal with. Get past that one and you'll draw serious attention from potential customers. Stumble on the issue and you're in deep doo-doo. That is ever truer when money is involved. Who wants a leak in their accounting data? When a big vendor slips up with security, David is given a clear shot at Goliath. And when a market is in the "tornado" growth phase, vendors do what it takes to highlight their competitors' weaknesses. This is the story behind the emerging battle between two UK accounting vendors, Kashflow and Sage.