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  1. Stackups
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  5. ExpressJS vs Tornado

ExpressJS vs Tornado

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Tornado
Tornado
Stacks530
Followers409
Votes167
GitHub Stars22.3K
Forks5.5K
ExpressJS
ExpressJS
Stacks35.1K
Followers24.0K
Votes1.6K

ExpressJS vs Tornado: What are the differences?

Introduction

In web development, ExpressJS and Tornado are two popular frameworks used for building server-side applications. While both ExpressJS and Tornado serve similar purposes, they have key differences that set them apart.

  1. Routing: ExpressJS offers a more flexible and extensive routing system, allowing developers to easily create and manage routes for different HTTP requests using simple and intuitive syntax. On the other hand, Tornado's routing system is less flexible and requires more boilerplate code to achieve the same level of routing functionality.

  2. Middleware: ExpressJS provides a robust middleware system that allows developers to easily integrate third-party middleware, customize the request-response cycle, and add additional functionalities to their applications. In contrast, Tornado's middleware support is more limited and less extensible, making it harder to implement complex middleware functionalities.

  3. Asynchronous Programming: Tornado is specifically designed for handling asynchronous operations efficiently, making it ideal for applications requiring high levels of concurrency. ExpressJS, while capable of handling asynchronous tasks, may not be as efficient as Tornado in managing concurrent operations due to its single-threaded nature.

  4. Template Engine: ExpressJS comes with support for popular template engines like Pug, EJS, and Handlebars, which makes it easy for developers to render dynamic content on the server side. Tornado, on the other hand, lacks built-in support for template engines, requiring developers to use third-party libraries or custom solutions to achieve similar functionality.

  5. Community and Ecosystem: ExpressJS has a larger and more active community than Tornado, resulting in a wealth of resources, plugins, and community-built modules that developers can leverage to accelerate their development process. In comparison, Tornado has a smaller community and ecosystem, which may limit the availability of resources and support for developers using the framework.

  6. Scalability: Tornado is known for its high performance and scalability, making it a preferred choice for building real-time web applications, APIs, and services that require handling a large number of concurrent connections. ExpressJS, while scalable in its own right, may not be as efficient as Tornado in scenarios where high scalability and performance are critical requirements.

In Summary, ExpressJS and Tornado differ in their routing capabilities, middleware support, asynchronous programming efficiency, template engine integration, community size, and scalability features.

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Advice on Tornado, ExpressJS

Tony
Tony

Oct 21, 2020

Review

I personally like using a wholly JS stack, with TypeORM + MySql/Postgres over MongoDb + Mongoose because TypeOrm's Typescript support is much stronger. After developing large projects with Typescript, there is no going back to regular javascript (typings help catch a LOT of errors / maintains data structure !)

Sticking with a javascript stack will allow you to share certain aspects of your application between front and backend. For example: one particularly common feature is to validate API call data and form entry data. Both of these are the same data shape typically (aside from pagination, metadata, etc), and can benefit from a single schema for validation. I use Yup to define this schema, then in the front and back end I can utilize this definition instead of rewriting the same logic in two different languages.

Same goes for certain utility functions such as data structure typings, decryption, encryption, sanitizing inputs, formatting of data, and other utilities. No point of writing these in two languages when both frontend and backend will use them. It will also help reduce developer work load, due to less tests / code to work with.

The only thing you must ensure in your import chain the frontend never imports any secret variables or sensitive logic used by the backend, as that will get bundled into your application. All shared imports should be individual modules

If you want to go one step further, next.js is basically create react app with server side rendering (SSR). This would allow you to skip the annoying step of configuring separate backend and frontend build tools. Might be worth exploring depending on your skill level.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Tornado
Tornado
ExpressJS
ExpressJS

By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

-
Robust routing;HTTP helpers (redirection, caching, etc);View system supporting 14+ template engines;Content negotiation;Focus on high performance;Executable for generating applications quickly;High test coverage
Statistics
GitHub Stars
22.3K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
5.5K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
530
Stacks
35.1K
Followers
409
Followers
24.0K
Votes
167
Votes
1.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 37
    Open source
  • 31
    So fast
  • 27
    Great for microservices architecture
  • 20
    Websockets
  • 17
    Simple
Cons
  • 2
    Event loop is complicated
Pros
  • 381
    Simple
  • 336
    Node.js
  • 244
    Javascript
  • 193
    High performance
  • 152
    Robust routing
Cons
  • 27
    Not python
  • 17
    Overrated
  • 14
    No multithreading
  • 9
    Javascript
  • 5
    Not fast
Integrations
Python
Python
Node.js
Node.js

What are some alternatives to Tornado, ExpressJS?

Node.js

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Symfony

Symfony

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

Spring

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

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