Just this last week I started working on a new project with django-socketio, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. Why is django-websocket-request better?

I did look into django-socketio when doing research, but never actually used it. django-websocket-request is way more simple, because it does way less and doesn't cover as much as django-socketio. For example, django-socketio is bound to only using socket.io, but it also includes a whole channel subscription and broadcast system so you can send messages from the server to specific channels. django-websocket-request only enables you to add a WebSocket layer over your already existing REST API / Views. I'll eventually have to look into doing things that django-socketio does.

Does django-websocket-request, like django-socketio , support fallback to other transport methods if websocket isn't available in a browser?

django-websocket-request doesn't really know anything about websockets specifically. The example I provided uses sockjs which provides websocket emulation and does upgrades to other methods if supported.

Ah, nice.

Does SockJSRouter do any magic to ensure that wrapped handlers won't block the Tornado event loop?

Not 100% sure but I would hope so. https://github.com/mrjoes/sockjs-tornado