As part of Facebook’s open source initiative, the company is today releasing the web framework that powers the real-time functionality of recently acquired FriendFeed as an open source tool. The Facebook Developer blog explains more about the framework, dubbed the Tornado Web Server. Written in Python, Tornado was developed from the ground up to handle thousands of simultaneous connections — critical to powering FriendFeed’s real-time functionality. Tornado puts its primary focus squarely on speed and handling the load from large amounts of traffic, differentiating it from similar frameworks in Python. The Technology Behind Tornado Facebook’s Director of Products, Bret Taylor, explains on his blog the technical details of Tornado more in-depth. He also describes the backstory behind rolling their own web framework as opposed to simply using an existing popular framework like Django: “our performance and feature requirements consistently diverged from these mainstream frameworks.” In...