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Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton

Settling onto decent Python Web Technologies

For the past five years, I have been looking for fast and easy-to-use web technology frameworks, in Python. When I first began to write python web apps, in 2000, CGIHTTPServer.py was pretty much it. In 2006, we have the opposite problem: there are so many frameworks that it is difficult to choose the right one.

For those people who are prepared to "cherry-pick" the most suitable components, I will outline and compare the individual components that I have analysed and considered for a large web server project: mod_python and vampire; formencode; sqlobject and pysqldb; htmltmpl, htmltemplate and ZPT/TAL; AJAX, google's AJAXSLT and python-lxml (for its XSLT capabilities); reportlab and the Python Imaging Library.

Some of these components are in use in existing frameworks: cherrypy (turbogears) for example comes by default with sqlobject and formencode.

I will also be outlining - with an unabashed degree of fervent ranting - why technologies like Zope, and also why the "code-embedding" aspects of PSP, PHP and ZPT/TAL etc. should be absolutely avoided like the plague, if you are a software developer.

In essence: the individual technologies that I have chosen are typically very very good at what they each do; they don't do anything else (and so some of them appear to be "unmaintained"!). Their combination makes me proud. Yet so many Web Frameworks invite you to do "Cool Stuff" - and inexperienced people use it "because it's there" - and so misuse it in ways that makes Visual Basic look like a walk in the park.