What’s new in Tornado 4.1

Feb 7, 2015

Highlights

  • If a Future contains an exception but that exception is never examined or re-raised (e.g. by yielding the Future), a stack trace will be logged when the Future is garbage-collected.
  • New class tornado.gen.WaitIterator provides a way to iterate over Futures in the order they resolve.
  • The tornado.websocket module now supports compression via the “permessage-deflate” extension. Override WebSocketHandler.get_compression_options to enable on the server side, and use the compression_options keyword argument to websocket_connect on the client side.
  • When the appropriate packages are installed, it is possible to yield asyncio.Future or Twisted Defered objects in Tornado coroutines.

Backwards-compatibility notes

  • HTTPServer now calls start_request with the correct arguments. This change is backwards-incompatible, afffecting any application which implemented HTTPServerConnectionDelegate by following the example of Application instead of the documented method signatures.

tornado.concurrent

  • If a Future contains an exception but that exception is never examined or re-raised (e.g. by yielding the Future), a stack trace will be logged when the Future is garbage-collected.
  • Future now catches and logs exceptions in its callbacks.

tornado.curl_httpclient

  • tornado.curl_httpclient now supports request bodies for PATCH and custom methods.
  • tornado.curl_httpclient now supports resubmitting bodies after following redirects for methods other than POST.
  • curl_httpclient now runs the streaming and header callbacks on the IOLoop.
  • tornado.curl_httpclient now uses its own logger for debug output so it can be filtered more easily.

tornado.gen

  • New class tornado.gen.WaitIterator provides a way to iterate over Futures in the order they resolve.
  • When the singledispatch library is available (standard on Python 3.4, available via pip install singledispatch on older versions), the convert_yielded function can be used to make other kinds of objects yieldable in coroutines.
  • New function tornado.gen.sleep is a coroutine-friendly analogue to time.sleep.
  • gen.engine now correctly captures the stack context for its callbacks.

tornado.httpclient

  • tornado.httpclient.HTTPRequest accepts a new argument raise_error=False to suppress the default behavior of raising an error for non-200 response codes.

tornado.httpserver

  • HTTPServer now calls start_request with the correct arguments. This change is backwards-incompatible, afffecting any application which implemented HTTPServerConnectionDelegate by following the example of Application instead of the documented method signatures.
  • HTTPServer now tolerates extra newlines which are sometimes inserted between requests on keep-alive connections.
  • HTTPServer can now use keep-alive connections after a request with a chunked body.
  • HTTPServer now always reports HTTP/1.1 instead of echoing the request version.

tornado.httputil

  • New function tornado.httputil.split_host_and_port for parsing the netloc portion of URLs.
  • The context argument to HTTPServerRequest is now optional, and if a context is supplied the remote_ip attribute is also optional.
  • HTTPServerRequest.body is now always a byte string (previously the default empty body would be a unicode string on python 3).
  • Header parsing now works correctly when newline-like unicode characters are present.
  • Header parsing again supports both CRLF and bare LF line separators.
  • Malformed multipart/form-data bodies will always be logged quietly instead of raising an unhandled exception; previously the behavior was inconsistent depending on the exact error.

tornado.ioloop

  • The kqueue and select IOLoop implementations now report writeability correctly, fixing flow control in IOStream.
  • When a new IOLoop is created, it automatically becomes “current” for the thread if there is not already a current instance.
  • New method PeriodicCallback.is_running can be used to see whether the PeriodicCallback has been started.

tornado.iostream

  • IOStream.start_tls now uses the server_hostname parameter for certificate validation.
  • SSLIOStream will no longer consume 100% CPU after certain error conditions.
  • SSLIOStream no longer logs EBADF errors during the handshake as they can result from nmap scans in certain modes.

tornado.options

tornado.platform.asyncio

tornado.platform.twisted

  • It is now possible to yield Deferred objects in coroutines when the singledispatch library is available and tornado.platform.twisted has been imported.

tornado.tcpclient

  • TCPClient will no longer raise an exception due to an ill-timed timeout.

tornado.tcpserver

  • TCPServer no longer ignores its read_chunk_size argument.

tornado.testing

  • AsyncTestCase has better support for multiple exceptions. Previously it would silently swallow all but the last; now it raises the first and logs all the rest.
  • AsyncTestCase now cleans up Subprocess state on tearDown when necessary.

tornado.web

tornado.websocket