[BangPypers] Web Application Development

[Kiran Jonnalagadda]

On 05-May-2011, at 5:26 PM, Noufal Ibrahim wrote:

> Flask - Young and lightweight. Flexible with components (you can mix and
> match parts). Very well documented, good community.
> 
> There's a bunch of offshoots of Zope (which was one of the earliest
> successfuly Python projects) like Grok, web2py etc. Haven't used any of
> them. 
> 
> I don't know anything about Pyramid and Pylons.

I've used Pyramid in its earlier incarnation as Repoze.BFG and liked it very much, but that was before Flask arrived on the scene. Now I use Flask for everything.

I have a major concern with Flask and SQLAlchemy that makes it hard to recommend them to others -- they mix up configuration with code.

Take, for example, the Flask-OAuth extension as documented here: http://packages.python.org/Flask-OAuth/

The documentation outlines Twitter integration. If you look at the sequence of the code, the OAuth handler must be provided a consumer_key and consumer_secret -- pieces of configuration -- before the handler code is written. Configuration has to be loaded while the module is being imported, not afterwards as a separate configure action.

SQLAlchemy declarative mode requires a Base metadata object to be shared by all models. This means you can't import models from two different sources. SQLAlchemy has a mixin syntax to get around this, but this is cumbersome.

This makes it really hard to reuse code.

Kiran