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I'm surprised this has never been mentioned. web.py is my first choice for small ad-hoc websites these days over PHP - the Python standard lib is a huge plus an

I'm surprised this has never been mentioned. web.py is my first choice for small ad-hoc websites these days over PHP - the Python standard lib is a huge plus and I've noticed that Python scales better than PHP on a small VPS. The foundation of web.py itself is pretty solid, so even after you replace the ORM with SQLAlchemy, and Templetor with Mako, you have a nimble, functional framework. I wish they figured out what to do with the globals though, that make scripts feel messy.

icey 17y ago
It's been mentioned a bunch of times, it just falls out of the dupe filter after some amount of time. http://searchyc.com/web.py http://searchyc.com/web.py Web.py's author (aaronsw) posts here occasionally.
nostrademons 17y ago
It has been mentioned a few times - the creator (aaronsw) is a YC alum and occasionally stops by this forum. It's fine for small ad-hoc websites, but it tends to run out of gas with larger, more complicated sites. The globals are a big issue, and you frequently end up writing wrappers around base web.py classes to fill in missing functionality. Might as well just start with Django and get the missing functionality to begin with.
- erlanger 17y ago
  Django unfortunately forces you into a restrictive architecture.
  - run4yourlives 17y ago
    Many people would argue that's a good thing.
jacquesm 17y ago
I've been busy learning django/python for a few weeks now and I'm reading pretty much all day. Someone on a forum somewhere mentioned this as a solution for some of the frustration a couple of people felt while working with django. My own personal list of bad stuff to date (about django, not web.py): There is a lot of 'magic' going on, in other words there are lots of things that have to be done 'just so' or it will not work and you'll get a totally meaningless error message (in fact the error messages are some of the worst I've ever seen). Simple things (like extending the user model) are done pretty kludgy and not standardized as part of the framework, which I really think they should be. It would be easy enough to 'augment' the user table in a documented manner for instance. Pretty much all of the documentation seems to teach you how to set up your applications in a non-portable way, in other words the application has to live in the named directory that it was conceived in. I'm definitely going to play around with webpy under wsgi as soon as I have a little bit of time.
- erlanger 17y ago
  That's the problem with most frameworks. The Auth looks nice but is a pain to implement just right...Profiles are painful enough in Django. I've noticed that in the end you usually have to rewrite the core components, so it's better to choose software that anticipates this. Django is great for run-of-the-mill sites, just like Rails -- I love generic views. I'm more likely to use Drupal for that class of website though.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Drupal is a total pain to upgrade though. That is, if you can do it. Plenty of times you find that going from one major release to the next you might as well rewrite the whole thing.
    - erlanger 17y ago
      But what do you actually rewrite? Module upgrades, if done properly, are straightforward, and the phptemplate API is stable (themes).
      - jacquesm 17y ago
        If your modules are going to be ported to the new version you're in luck. Upgrades are usually only supported for 'core', major revision upgrades of modules more often than not simply fail to convert the data to whatever backwards incompatible format they've come up with this time around. On the whole drupal feels extremely immature, in spite of having gone through 6 major releases.

icey 17y ago

It's been mentioned a bunch of times, it just falls out of the dupe filter after some amount of time. http://searchyc.com/web.py http://searchyc.com/web.py Web.py's author (aaronsw) posts here occasionally.

nostrademons 17y ago

It has been mentioned a few times - the creator (aaronsw) is a YC alum and occasionally stops by this forum. It's fine for small ad-hoc websites, but it tends to run out of gas with larger, more complicated sites. The globals are a big issue, and you frequently end up writing wrappers around base web.py classes to fill in missing functionality. Might as well just start with Django and get the missing functionality to begin with.

erlanger 17y ago
Django unfortunately forces you into a restrictive architecture.
- run4yourlives 17y ago
  Many people would argue that's a good thing.

jacquesm 17y ago

I've been busy learning django/python for a few weeks now and I'm reading pretty much all day. Someone on a forum somewhere mentioned this as a solution for some of the frustration a couple of people felt while working with django. My own personal list of bad stuff to date (about django, not web.py): There is a lot of 'magic' going on, in other words there are lots of things that have to be done 'just so' or it will not work and you'll get a totally meaningless error message (in fact the error messages are some of the worst I've ever seen). Simple things (like extending the user model) are done pretty kludgy and not standardized as part of the framework, which I really think they should be. It would be easy enough to 'augment' the user table in a documented manner for instance. Pretty much all of the documentation seems to teach you how to set up your applications in a non-portable way, in other words the application has to live in the named directory that it was conceived in. I'm definitely going to play around with webpy under wsgi as soon as I have a little bit of time.

erlanger 17y ago
That's the problem with most frameworks. The Auth looks nice but is a pain to implement just right...Profiles are painful enough in Django. I've noticed that in the end you usually have to rewrite the core components, so it's better to choose software that anticipates this. Django is great for run-of-the-mill sites, just like Rails -- I love generic views. I'm more likely to use Drupal for that class of website though.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Drupal is a total pain to upgrade though. That is, if you can do it. Plenty of times you find that going from one major release to the next you might as well rewrite the whole thing.
  - erlanger 17y ago
    But what do you actually rewrite? Module upgrades, if done properly, are straightforward, and the phptemplate API is stable (themes).
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      If your modules are going to be ported to the new version you're in luck. Upgrades are usually only supported for 'core', major revision upgrades of modules more often than not simply fail to convert the data to whatever backwards incompatible format they've come up with this time around. On the whole drupal feels extremely immature, in spite of having gone through 6 major releases.