What’s new in Tornado 2.0

Jun 21, 2011

Major changes:
* Template output is automatically escaped by default; see backwards
  compatibility note below.
* The default AsyncHTTPClient implementation is now simple_httpclient.
* Python 3.2 is now supported.

Backwards compatibility:
* Template autoescaping is enabled by default.  Applications upgrading from
  a previous release of Tornado must either disable autoescaping or adapt
  their templates to work with it.  For most applications, the simplest
  way to do this is to pass autoescape=None to the Application constructor.
  Note that this affects certain built-in methods, e.g. xsrf_form_html
  and linkify, which must now be called with {% raw %} instead of {}
* Applications that wish to continue using curl_httpclient instead of
  simple_httpclient may do so by calling
    AsyncHTTPClient.configure("tornado.curl_httpclient.CurlAsyncHTTPClient")
  at the beginning of the process.  Users of Python 2.5 will probably want
  to use curl_httpclient as simple_httpclient only supports ssl on Python 2.6+.
* Python 3 compatibility involved many changes throughout the codebase,
  so users are encouraged to test their applications more thoroughly than
  usual when upgrading to this release.

Other changes in this release:
* Templates support several new directives:
  - {% autoescape ...%} to control escaping behavior
  - {% raw ... %} for unescaped output
  - {% module ... %} for calling UIModules
* {% module Template(path, **kwargs) %} may now be used to call another
  template with an independent namespace
* All IOStream callbacks are now run directly on the IOLoop via add_callback.
* HTTPServer now supports IPv6 where available.  To disable, pass
  family=socket.AF_INET to HTTPServer.bind().
* HTTPClient now supports IPv6, configurable via allow_ipv6=bool on the
  HTTPRequest.  allow_ipv6 defaults to false on simple_httpclient and true
  on curl_httpclient.
* RequestHandlers can use an encoding other than utf-8 for query parameters
  by overriding decode_argument()
* Performance improvements, especially for applications that use a lot of
  IOLoop timeouts
* HTTP OPTIONS method no longer requires an XSRF token.
* JSON output (RequestHandler.write(dict)) now sets Content-Type to
  application/json
* Etag computation can now be customized or disabled by overriding
  RequestHandler.compute_etag
* USE_SIMPLE_HTTPCLIENT environment variable is no longer supported.
  Use AsyncHTTPClient.configure instead.