On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 10:38 AM, Thomas G. Willis<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I agree too. If Django supported sqlalchemy as well as it does it's
> own ORM I would likely be using it. But it seems like the price of all
> the cool stuff Django offers is living with their ORM. I don't know
> how this spins in favor of pylons though. It seems to me that TG
> should be more concerned with keeping up/competing with the Jone's.
>
> Pylons to me almost seems like Spring for the Web. My understanding of
> Spring is very light but it seems to me that the goal of loose
> coupling, or rather, as much coupling as YOU deem necessary is it's
> strength. Maybe Paste is responsible for that and Pylons is an MVC
> framework built on top of that? 
> http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.x/reference/mvc.html

A lot of frameworks are doing more or less the same thing.  This is
one of the reasons it's hard to say why Pylons is "better" from a user
perspective or killer-app perspective.  I said earlier my favorite
advantage of Pylons: "modularity, which provides flexibility for the
future, because you don't know what you'll need in the future".  Some
people objected that this is irrelevant to a newbie looking for a
framework, or a company nervous about using anything except the top 3
mentioned in InfoWeek.  But it's why *I* chose Pylons, and there are
at least a few other people looking for the same.

The WSGI type developers all work closely together now.  Twisted and
Django are more detached, but among the others there's a lot of
sharing ideas and implementations, even with Zope (via Repoze).  So
the Pylons developers aren't just thinking "Pylons" but "WSGI" and
"Python".  So what distinguishes Pylons is not being totally unique,
but in being the "first" in some things, its preference for
Routes-style dispatching, the magic globals (love them or not), etc.
So, one could write a killer CMS or bugtracker in Pylons.  But will it
ever be as good as Plone?  Will it not be ported to TurboGears and
web.py soon after it comes out?  After all, the frameworks do more or
less the same thing in different ways.  SQLAlchemy is useful in
Pylons, but it's useful in several other frameworks too.  So we can
point to our SQLAlchemy integration, but we can't say we're the only
framework that has it because others will just say "We have that too."

Perhaps Pylons' greatest asset is influence rather than popularity.
It's gaining respect and market share among those who know a lot about
Python frameworks.  (There's a selling point for newbies.)  It may
become the "central" framework in the way Debian has become central
among Linux distributors.  It may not be the most popular, but it's
central because it's vendor neutral (doesn't favor one company over
another the way RedHat or Fedora do), and forms a reference
implementation.  Pylons' use of Paste, Beaker, Routes, etc, validate
those libraries and has encouraged other frameworks to adopt them.
Pylons' smallness makes it nimble.  We can use ToscaWidgets without
being tied down to it.  We can take our time evaluating AuthKit vs
repoze.who/what.  We can become the first adopter of whatever future
library may appear, and prove its (un)usefulness to the wider
Python-web world.  Other frameworks reject Pylons' design decisions,
but they keep looking at Pylons for ideas, to see what works.  So
Pylons has an influence much wider than its userbase.

Regarding Spring, based on a brief glance at its webpage:

- Its MVC has both a Controller and a FrontController.  The
FrontController is equivalent to PylonsApp.  The Controller is what
Pylons calls a Controller and Django calls a View, although Python
usage may be shifting toward the View direction (?).

- The Controller returns a Model, which the FrontController passes to
the view.  This is similar to 'c' in Pylons.

- The URL mapper is an XML file, linking URLs to controllers, views,
and models.  It also has "pluggable MVC", which I think would be the
equivalent of modularizing part of PylonsApp to allow for different
paradigms.  The Pypes project is experimenting with a config-file
mapper and perhaps pluggable MVC.

-- 
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
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to