I was playing around with something similar, and I think you might be able to get better performance by using render_context, and creating a context with the current request handler. This way mako will write directly to your request, and not buffer into a string.

Here's my render_template:

def render_template(self, templatename, **kwargs):
mytemplate = self.makolookup.get_template(templatename)
context = Context(self)
try:
#r = mytemplate.render(h=helpers, **kwargs)
mytemplate.render_context(context, **kwargs)
except:
exceptions.html_error_template().render_context(context)
raise

And Matt, see http://github.com/hudora/huBarcode so you can generate QR codes locally. ^_~

As for my opinion about sessions… it really depends on what kind of info your looking to store. If there is anything remotely sensitive you prob want to hold onto it yourself. If you need to persist something for a long period of time then cookies are the way to go. I tend to use a combo of both. To each his own though.

Thx for the comments. I'll keep an eye on your repo. Interested to see where you end up with it. I think some of the things your working on will make Tornado a much more approachable option for a lot of developers.

It's often better to join forces than be the lonely hero. I hope that with sessions I can get Ian Bicking's FormEncode validators integrated (disclosure: Iam one of FE authors), so we get an leightweight web-app framework similar to TurboGears.

Currently I am stuck by the decision whether to use (in my own web-app) sessions at all or whether to let the clients store everything in cookies, to spare me the overhead of storing and retrieving session data. How do you think about this?