My Response to Tornado’s Lack of Documentation

My favorite web framework for web development is Tornado. Aside from the fact that Tornado is fast, non-blocking, and can handle 1000s of standing connections, it’s extremely simple. As a result, I’ve been recommending Tornado to all of my Pythonist friends for their web apps and side projects.

In doing so, one problem that keeps coming up is Tornado’s lack of documentation. Tornado’s website does provide walk-throughs on each of the major components of the framework, but for any web application beyond the basic “Hello World” you’ll find that you need to dig into the source code to really get an idea of how to do even the most trivial tasks. I suspect that this method of documentation is fine for people who like reading source code, but not everybody wants to learn that way.

A lack of easily-read documentation raises the adoption barrier and makes it harder for a community to come together around the Tornado framework. (Us Pythonists, in general, are used to well-documented modules anyway.)

My response is to take on the challenge of documenting the Tornado framework. In the upcoming days I will be launching pieces of this plan. My hope is that by announcing this plan here, I’ll stick to it and provide lots of value to the Python community.

If you’d like to help out with this project, feel free to reply below, tweet at me, or send me an email.