[Baypiggies] Django frontend alternatives

[K. Richard Pixley]

I researched toolkits and server side engines a few months back.  
Personally, I decided to go with something pylons based, but I don't 
think it really matters much at this point.  Server side problems are 
all pretty well solved for now and all of the modern ones seem 
comparably functional, (or comparably extensible).

The browser side toolkit is a different question.  Which one you chose 
will depend on what you need and how you want to use it.  I'm probably 
going with ext-js because I'm specifically looking for a strong grid 
widget, (user selectable columns, user sortable columns, user selectable 
column order), nothing else has a suitable grid widget, and the entire 
widget set looks good and seems pretty well integrated.  (I wrote here 
about comparisons a few months back.)

As far as I can tell, the only attempt to mix server side anything with 
browser code is TurboWidgets, but the documentation is so sparse that I 
couldn't see how to use it easily.  I suspect that this may be a 
superior approach and one that will be very hot very soon, but just now 
the barrier to entry seems exceedingly high, (and the mailing list isn't 
particularly supportive of newbies).

Without an actual server side/browser side integration, (like 
TurboWidgets), I don't think the template really matters.  You'll still 
be writing javascript separately and shipping it down to the browser 
more or less as opaque code from the point of view of the templating system.

Pyjamas merits special mention.  It's a different paradigm entirely.  In 
Pyjamas, you write browser code in python with ajax calls and it's 
compiled into javascript.  The down side is that the widget library for 
pyjamas is rudimentary, (no grid widget, no complex widgets).

--rich