[Tutor] web development

[Mike Hansen]

> Subject:
> [Tutor] web development
> From:
> Don Jennings <djennings3 at earthlink.net>
> Date:
> Tue, 27 Sep 2005 22:13:30 -0400
> To:
> tutor at python.org
> 
> To:
> tutor at python.org
> 
> 
> Earlier this month, Kent posted that Jython and Velocity are a good way 
> to develop dynamic web sites. After a little searching, it seems that 
> there are quite a few options for web development in Python (perhaps too 
> many?). So, rather than ask for recommendations of which one to use, 
> what I would really like to know are how people decided to use any 
> particular framework.
> 
> Thanks!
> Don
> 
> P.S. As an aside, does anyone have any experience with django? (I really 
> like the name since I am fond of django reinhardt, the jazz guitarist.)
> 

I've looked at a few of the web development frameworks for Python. I'm thinking 
I'm going with CherryPy on my next project. Reading the docs, it seems to click 
with me. Mapping URLs directly to python functions seems pretty simple and 
flexible. The POST and GET parameters just show up as arguments to your 
functions. You can even decide weather or not you want to expose the function or 
not. You can use any HTML templating toolkit you want with it. I'm still 
deciding on the templating toolkit to use.

Here's my take on some of the other frameworks....

Zope
It seems too big for my purposes. If your web apps are going to be high volume, 
Zope is probably the answer.

Quixote
It seems a little weird and complex to me. I may look at it again someday.

Django
Uses the MVC philosophy, and appears to build a directory structure to 
facilitate that philosophy. I'm not sure I want to go there yet in that you need 
to work its way and not your way. I've heard that it's very similar to Ruby on 
Rails.

Nevow
If I recall, it extracted woven from the Twisted Framework so that it could work 
on it's own. Kind of reminded me of Quixote.

There are many others that I passed on for various reasons.

For me, if it looked like a steep learning curve, then I thought I'd be better 
off with something else. I also wanted something that's been around for a 
while(stable) with a good size community to help if I got stuck. It had to be 
fairly easy to install and configure. I didn't want to spend all my time getting 
it up and running on a development server. Then having problems when it's time 
to install on a production server or other servers at different locations.

Mike