The controversy surrounding this is just really funny. I wrote my own comet webserver in Java to run Mibbit (Hopefully I'll open source it one day soon - maybe

The controversy surrounding this is just really funny. I wrote my own comet webserver in Java to run Mibbit (Hopefully I'll open source it one day soon - maybe when facebook acquire me lol). It's pretty awesome IMHO, and happily handles thousands of concurrent users in a single thread, doing thousands of http requests a second, on a medium size VPS server. Writing your own stuff makes perfect sense. Here's why I personally did it * Comet is very important to a realtime app. I wanted to make sure I had the best server in the world for that. * I wanted to learn the complete low level details so I could be sure that the protocol,systems,etc were best possible, and just so I know exactly what's going on under the hood. (Knowing the whole code base inside out means I can really heavily optimize) * One of the worst situation you can ever be in IMHO, is trying to find a bug, which ends up being in some badly written 3rd party lib. If it's in your own code, it's far easier to find+fix. * It's not that hard. It's just webserver networking etc code. Yes there were other comet servers out there, but they all seemed pretty 'general purpose', overly complex, etc for what I wanted. I think the take-away from the Tornado release isn't "Wow! There's a new web framework here you should use it!". It should be "If it makes sense to reinvent the wheel, you should totally reinvent the wheel." The amount you learn in the process is invaluable in itself.