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Tornado

Thursday, September 10, 2009 by Dave Winer.

The former FriendFeed company now owned by Facebook did something very interesting today. They released Tornado which is the customized web server that runs the backend of FriendFeed. 

I speculate in a thread on FF: "Just thinking out loud if there were a REST interface for the backend that worked like the REST interface for the client, I would be able to program both ends without having to learn the internals of your system. It would be really elegant, and probably wouldn't cost that much in overhead. I was able to create an interface to the client side of your realtime API in an hour or two. If I could sneak into the backend the same way that's all I'd need to at least put together a proof of concept. Does this make any sense?" 

We need what their backend does to make the connection from rssCloud to desktops. This is something the FriendFeed guys mastered, and there's reason to believe it scales to the level we'd need since they are the guys who did GMail and Google Maps.  

Interesting times we live in. 

I also reminded people that when cool technologies are shipping everywhere it's not a time of death it's a time of life, as long as we have the web to connect our work, there's nothing exclusive about it. The engineers don't think we're wiping each other out, only the pundits and the hangers-on do.  

Interesting times we live in. 

And that's a good thing.  

BTW, elsewhere on Facebook, our friend Blake Ross shipped Facebook Lite, which we heard was wonderful and are not surprised to find out is. Congrats all around!