Talks at previous PyCons have tended to be of the lecture format. I'd like to see if we can get some panel discussions going and am looking for participants. At PyCon 2005 in D.C. Michelle Levesque gave a wonderful talk, PyWebOff, contrasting a few of the web frameworks. However, it is a lot of work to research many of them, so how about instead we just invite some experts for the various frameworks to debate them instead? And answer tough questions from the audience? For updating, links to the following rough outlines are at: http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/TalkIdeas We need some moderators to work up more questions, and to coordinate with the panelists. Hey, it may be easier than preparing your own presentation and slides. I'd like to see three talk panels: --- Panel - Web Frameworks Frameworks * Django * Zope 2 * Zope 3 * Twisted Web * Quixote * TurboGears Questions Put To the Panel * When did the framework come into existence and what problem was it created to solve? * What are its strengths and maturity level? What is it ideal to use for? * What are its weaknesses? What would you NOT use it for? --- Panel - Web Templating Languages Templates Covered * Zope TAL, TALES, METAL * Twisted STAN * Cheetah * Myghty * Django's Template Language * TurboGears Kid * Quixote Python Template Language (PTL) Questions to Put to the Panelists * Python code in your HTML, or HTML in your code? * Which can and cannot be handed off to a graphics designer? * Where do they stand in performance? in Caching? * Which can work with less than a page i.e. Zope viewlets, widgets? * Which frameworks let me plug in my choice of template language? (initially show the audience a representative sample of each) --- Panel - Object Relational Mappers (ORMs) Mappers Covered * SQLObject * SQLAlchemy * Django ORM Questions Put to Panelists * Natural or artificial keys? * Support for existing database schemas or must I do it your way? * How is the performance? * How smart is it in handling complex schema? * Any support for access control security at the object level? * What flavor and degree of transaction support is offered? Per thread, per context, autocommit? -Jeff Co-Chair PyCon 2007