The Wiredset/Trendrr team is proud to announce the open source release of our new python web framework named Whirlwind. You can check out the code and docs on the trendrr/whirlwind github page.

Whirlwind is a collection of cutting edge technologies that have been pulled together and enhanced to deliver a simple to use, massively scalable and blazingly fast web framework. We’ve taken some of today’s fastest open source technologies and bundled it with a lot of features and tools that make rapid development of new apps a snap.

The whirlwind code base was originally developed as the underlying web framework for the most recent version of trendrr.com. As the focus of our business has shifted from over-time to real-time we quickly realized that our previous web stack just wasn’t built for speed. We did a lot of digging around and came up with a stack that is a better fit for managing and delivering the massive amounts of data we process in a more real-time manner.

The core of the Whirlwind framework builds off of the genius work being done by Facebook with Tornado. We integrated Mako templates and swapped out our old MySQL database back-end for the robust, but simple, NoSQL database, MongoDB. Add to that a bunch of other helpful bells and whistles and we came out the other side with a very fast and scalable web framework that is simple to use and drastically improves our ability to rapidly develop new apps.

Here is a list of some of the more notable features that you get out of the box:

• Structured app templates
• Session management
• Multi-threaded request decorators
• Request route decorators
• Helpful template filters
• Mongo ORM
• Flash messaging
• Role based user authentication
• Simple multiport start/stop init.d script
• Easy admin script for generating new apps and cookie secret hashes
• Middleware plugin system
• Database and file logger
• Pagination
• Static error templates

With all that said, we would suggest you don’t take our word for it. Give it a shot and let us know what you think. We hope that you will find it as useful as we have and would love any feedback, patches, feature suggestions or help you would like to offer. We feel very strongly that giving back to the open source community is vital and we would like to thank everyone that is out there creating innovative software that makes what we do possible. Stay tuned to the trendrr github profile for all the latest news and updates on all our open source projects.