On 1/3/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Pylons is a very nice framework and new features are very good like Mako. But Pylons has one problem - "what in the nine hells is Pylons ?" - It isn't too popular, which is bad, very bad ;)
It's basically a "put your money where your mouth is" situation. Contacting hosting companies, more HOWTOs and a book are good ideas, but somebody's gotta do them. Pylons' main problem is it's new and not stable yet. Plus it depends on so many third-party libraries, many of which themselves are new, so the Pylons developers have to chase down more inter-package issues than with other frameworks, even TurboGears. This woven-together approach is one of Pylons' unique strengths but it's arguably more developer-intensive, meaning less time for marketing until things stablize more. It's also worth looking at where Python's web support tools in general are going. They're evolving rapidly, and many people feel the Python-web intelligentsia needs to speak with one voice and advocate one or two frameworks for the casual user, even if it's not the framework they personally use or develop. Otherwise the py-curious get overwhelmed by the choices and go with Ruby or Java instead. Supposedly there are more Rails users than all the Python web developers combined, and an even larger number of people are doing their first web project and shopping for a language. It's more important for us that they choose Python than which Python framework they choose. Many of them will choose only something that's "like Rails". TurboGears and Django fill that need now, both in being "like Rails", having newbie-friendliness as one of their primary goals, and having that all-important book. But notice that TG and Django did not even exist two years ago; that's how rapidly things are evolving. Webware knocked Zope off the throne, CherryPy knocked Webware (with help from Quixote), TG knocked CherryPy, Django and TG are neck-in-neck now, who knows who will be top dog next year? But Pylons will likely be in the top three next year because it fills a unique niche: the "hackers' framework". There are a considerable number of users who are less concerned about whether the HOWTOs are finished than the philosophy of the framework, and they're partial to the "small sharp tools" philosophy. Small sharp tools that can be woven together: exactly what made Unix take off in the 70s. Pylons is "the" WSGI framework. Other frameworks connect to WSGI HTTP servers, but only Pylons (and standalone Paste) are truly built around WSGI. That has the potential to bring in lots of web developers down the road, as more middleware becomes available and people get more comfortable aggregating multiple mini-applications into a single site. If Pylons can pull off a newbie-friendly stunt on top of that, it would corner the market. But we're really just following the lead of TG and Django in that regard, porting the tutorials they've written, and I don't see how that can change unless we get a large dedicated marketing staff like they have. Unless somebody can think of something spectacular to do that they haven't done. A killer app, for instance. I've written some articles looking at Python-web's evolution. None of them are recent enough to mention Pylons, but the trends they do discuss are still happening. http://linuxgazette.net/authors/orr.html
Also free hosting (or free for Pylons/FOSS web sites) is a must ;)
You're dreaming, right? Somebody has to pay the ISP's bandwidth/rent/hardware.
More docs and in a more friendly layout. In Django to start working with databases user needs to check two pages - "Creating models", "The database API " which explain in a nice way how to use that part of the framework. For this example a Pylons only SQLAlchemy tutorial would be required (how to add,edit,delete,search, how to make complex queries, how to create models). The docs layout could be like django/djangoo book - explain one feature at a time, no SQLAlchemy + Myghty + Helpers + FooSomething at once. Lolish examples with print's are very good for learning. Move tips from mailing list to the site.
If you feel like putting an outline on the wiki, it would encourage others to fill it in. -- Mike Orr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
