What mutex/locking/waiting mechanism to use when writing a Chat application with Tornado Web Framework

Question

We're implementing a Chat server using Tornado.

The premise is simple, a user makes open an HTTP ajax connection to the Tornado server, and the Tornado server answers only when a new message appears in the chat-room. Whenever the connection closes, regardless if a new message came in or an error/timeout occurred, the client reopens the connection.

Looking at Tornado, the question arises of what library can we use to allow us to have these calls wait on some central object that would signal them - A_NEW_MESSAGE_HAS_ARRIVED_ITS_TIME_TO_SEND_BACK_SOME_DATA.

To describe this in Win32 terms, each async call would be represented as a thread that would be hanging on a WaitForSingleObject(...) on some central Mutex/Event/etc.

We will be operating in a standard Python environment (Tornado), is there something built-in we can use, do we need an external library/server, is there something Tornado recommends?

Thanks

Answer 1

I'm looking into the best options for developing a chat application and was looking into tornado as well. This rough cuts Building the Realtime User Experience has a chapter on building a chat application with tornado that might be useful to you. Best of luck :)

Answer 2

Tornado has a "chat" example which uses long polling. It contains everything you need (or actually, probably more than you need since it includes a 3rd-party login)