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. ^_~

(however the with:public waves are pretty entertaining)

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.

After about six of my friends joined and us doing one wave, we realized it sounded way better on the videos than it was in reality: Very seldom was two or more of us online and logged into Wave the same time. Mostly it has been like emails, which you can comment inline and which are on the same version when you logged in. I believe that only in rare occasions the real-time thing is needed. And then you better make a phone call or chat by Jabber or Google Talk.

The revolution didn't really appear. In the meanwhile, we resorted to emails.

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?