Diesel Web

Diesel Web is a Python web application framework containing very simplistic components. Rather than focusing on providing a rich set of application components, the focus is on raw performance. With this aspect of the web application taken care of, developers can focus on functionality, with the more freedom than most other frameworks can offer.

The performance offered by Diesel Web is achieved through non-blocking, asynchronous IO. This is different from most other web application frameworks in that most use the thread pool pattern. In the thread pool pattern, a main thread listens for incoming requests and passes control to a thread in the pool. Once the request has been handed off to the thread inside the pool, the main thread can then go back to listening for requests and doesn't need to worry about blocking while processing individual requests. This is the common way that concurrency is achieved in web application frameworks.

The asynchronous IO approach taken by Diesel Web scales better than the thread pool approach because there aren't any locking and synchronization primitives that accumulate overhead. IO events dictate what happens at the OS level and can thus scale better. The real benefit to using this approach would become apparent with thousands of users.

One other topic of interest with Diesel Web is the complete lack of dependencies, which is always a good thing. The framework appears to be striving for simplicity, another good thing, and doesn't really need much help from external packages. Basic HTTP protocol support is built in and that is really all that is needed as a starting point. It will be interesting to see if many other larger applications get built using this framework.