I’m sure I’ve written something very similar in the past, but I want to rant again, because it came up.
First I looked at Ruby on Rails, then I started looking around for equivalents that were written in python, since the languages are sort of fundamentally similar, and I already know python pretty well so having such a framework would mean less time learning a new programming language.
Well, turns out there are like 5 bazillion web app frameworks written in python. Even van Rossum laments about the situation. Why does the SNR for good open source projects be so low? I guess the problem is there is not trustworthy rating system or peer review system. It’s always a bunch of biased internet users making arguments in favor of the only product they’ve ever used.. and I can’t blame them.. there are way too many to try them all and gain any kind of reasonable perspective.
There’s also some weird interaction between the nature of open source projects, the internet, and the ego’s and pride of programmers that causes this explosion of tens if not hundreds of projects that all do the same thing but in mediocre ways. I guess I can’t really talk about it when I’m considering writing my own blog system myself ;-P. But at least I don’t plan to make it useful for anyone other than myself, and I want the framework I choose to do as much of the work as possible for me. I’m not here to re-invent an existing wheel. There just doesn’t seem to be a wheel that fits my needs.
So anyways, it looks like TurboGears or webpy are looking like likely candidates.. though the former seems somewhat still unfinished, and the latter seems pretty minimal. I’ll probably end up really giving RoR a go first, since it’s probably easier to learn a well documented programming language (ruby) then a not so well documented, incomplete web app framework.
Probably the biggest factor right now is that Dreamhost actually supports RoR, whereas any other option requires a bunch of ugly and unfortunate installation steps (which just means more maintenance later).