Hiawatha

The goal of this project is to do one thing and do it well, namely serving static web directories and doing that right. Most other solutions either are too complex (CGI support, dependencies on external libraries, etc.) or lack features you expect (TLS, virtual hosts, partial content, not modified since, etc.). quark tries to find a midway and just restrict itself to being static while still offering functions you only find in more bloated solutions and being as secure as possible (chroot, privilege dropping, strict parsers, no malloc at runtime, pledge, unveil, etc.). We believe that most of the web does not need to be dynamic and increasing complexity on server-side applications is one of the main reasons for the web obesity crisis. The common approach nowadays is to do everything on the server, including parsing requests, modifying files and databases, generating HTML and all that using unfit languages like PHP or JavaScript, which is a security and efficiency nightmare.

Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. 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. Tornado is different from most Python web frameworks. It is not based on WSGI, and it is typically run with only one thread per process. While some support of WSGI is available in the tornado.wsgi module, it is not a focus of development and most applications should be written to use Tornado’s own interfaces (such as tornado.web) directly instead of using WSGI. In general, Tornado code is not thread-safe. Tornado is integrated with the standard library asyncio module and shares the same event loop (by default since Tornado 5.0). In general, libraries designed for use with asyncio can be mixed freely with Tornado.