<br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/17/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Massimo Di Pierro</b> <<a href="mailto:mdipierro@cti.depaul.edu">mdipierro@cti.depaul.edu</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Thank you for the suggestions to look into elixir.<br><br>I think elixir is great and I will use it as soon as this issue with<br>Tesla is fixed<br><a href="http://code.google.com/p/tesla-pylons-elixir/issues/detail?id=25">
http://code.google.com/p/tesla-pylons-elixir/issues/detail?id=25</a><br><br>I did not know that mod_wsgi was now stable. I will definitively<br>check it out.<br><br>Please do not misunderstand my previous comments:<br><br>
I am not talking about creating another python web framework and I<br>think you people have created impressive python libraries. All I am<br>saying is that today I find very hard to make the case to my students<br>why they should use one python framework over another, and I find it
<br>even harder to make the case to businesses.</blockquote><div><br>I don't think you should try to convince your students why they should use a Python framework over any other Python framework. Most often this decision comes down to a matter of taste. You should finds the best framework for your needs and encourage students to explore the other options and pick the one that feels most comfortable to them. Personally I'm often frustrated by "frameworks" and often end up building something out of components that suits my needs. Most of the existing frameworks are great when trying to build an application quickly but I believe that any serious large scale commercialy application will deviate significantly from the standard way of doing things.
<br><br>I think it will be harder to convince companies to adopt Python web frameworks simply because AFAIK there are much fewer Python developers and they are generally more expensive than the army of J2EE developers.<br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> In order for the<br>community to be able to make that case you must come together and
<br>concede something: choose one ORM, one template language, one<br>framework. I only gave you my point of view about components to stir<br>discussion, and my point of view is biased by my teaching needs.<br>I could write my own "perfect" web framework but that is not my
<br>point. Too much choice is killing python web frameworks because the<br>work of many good people is scattered and not focused.</blockquote><div><br>I don't think there is one right way of doing web application development. I like that frameworks like Pylons (i'm most familiar with Pylons, as far as I know TurboGears allows the same) allow one to use SQLAlchemy or SQLObject as ORMs and Kid, Genshi, Myghty, Mako (and probably more) for templating. If I recall correctly someone was complaning earlier that the Django ORM is too hard to use outside of Django otherwise I bet it could be integrated into Pylons as well.
<br><br>I haven't done much J2EE web development but as far as I can tell there are many choices in that area as well with things like JSPs, JSF, Spring, Struts, JDBC, Hibernate, EJB<br><br>I could be wrong but I don't think that the reason Java is popular for web development is due to having just one way of doing things. I think it was better commercial support, options for integrating with legacy systems and availability of developers that helped Java become the de-facto enterprise standard for web application development.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I think you should budget some time during the next meeting to talk<br>to users, discuss the possibility to merge the existing frameworks,
<br>simplify them, agree on a small set of stable APIs, give some<br>guarantees to the users about the stability of the APIs and document<br>them or businesses will not invest in it.</blockquote><div><br>I think this kind of effort will lead to Sun style over-engineering trying to make something that will satisfy everyone and likely not ever be done. I don't know about other folks but I care more about finding the right tool for the job than building frameworks for the sake of building frameworks. I think most of the current frameworks emerged out of the effort of a couple of individuals to build something that would work for them.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">So far only Django has been able to gather enough attention but it is<br>still too difficult to use when compared with Rails.
<br></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I think there are enough people in the area to come out with an<br>excellent product (but not 4 or 5) and an excellent marketing machine
<br>for it.</blockquote><div><br>What I think is missing is a strong business arguement for using something like Python for web application development. I've seen a couple of rather unconvincing articles on the topic but no concrete evidence. Can a team of experienced Python developers can write something better, faster or cheaper than a team of experienced Java developers? (By better I mean one or more of: less bugs, easier to maintain, or faster to add new features).
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Massimo<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Chicago mailing list
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