I used various versions of Django when I first started hacking on Appengine. Eventually I just gave up and switched to Tornado. Why? Django is a large and tig

I used various versions of Django when I first started hacking on Appengine. Eventually I just gave up and switched to Tornado. Why? Django is a large and tightly coupled beast of a framework. It's very likely that a given plugin reaches down to the DB level meaning that it'd have to be manually ported to Appengine. Every single project which tried to port Django to GAE relied on either monkey patching during runtime or forking the codebase. This was an enormous amount of work as you can imagine, and the benefits grew smaller and smaller as simpler frameworks became available. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not ragging on Django just because it's large. I'm sure at one point, Django started out as a simple, and clean framework. I am starting to see the same changes in Tornado -- the more people who use it, the more features (and code) are added to keep them satisfied. This goes on until a certain point where the underlying technology (the DB in django's case) changes and it's easier to just start again from scratch.