Django vs other Python web frameworks?

Question

I\'ve pretty much tried every Python web framework that exists, and it took me a long time to realize there wasn\'t a silver bullet framework, each had its own advantages an

Answer 1

Your question seems to be "is it worth learning WSGI and doing everything yourself," or using a "full stack framework that does everything for you."

I'd say that's a false dichotomy and there's an obvious third way. TurboGears 2 tries to provide a smooth path from a "do everything for you" style framework up to an understanding of WSGI middleware, and an ability to customize almost every aspect of the framework to suit your application's needs.

We may not be successful in every place at every level, but particularly if you've already got some TurboGears 1 experience I think the TG2 learning curve will be very, very easy at first and you'll have the ability to go deeper exactly when you need it.

To address your particular issues:

• We provide an authorization system out of the box that matches the one you're used to from TG1.
• We provide an out of the box "django admin" like interface called the tgext.admin, which works great with dojo to make a fancy spreadsheet like interface the default.

I'd also like to address a couple of the other options that are out there and talk a little bit about the benifits.

• CherryPy. I think CherryPy is a great webserver and a nice minimalistic web-framework. It's not based on WSGI internally but has good WSGI support although it will not provide you with the "full stack" experience. But for custom setups that need to be both fast and aren't particularly suited to the defaults provided by Django or TurboGears, it's a great solution.

• Django. I think Django is a very nice, tigtly integrated system for developing websites. If your application and style of working fits well within it's standard setup it can be fantastic. If however you need to tune your DB usage, replace the template language, use a different user authorization model or otherwise do things differently you may very likely find yourself fighting the framework.

• Pylons Pylons like CherryPy is a great minimalistic web-framework. Unlike CherryPy it's WSGI enabled through the whole system and provides some sane defaults like SQLAlchemy and Mako that can help you scale well. The new official docs are of much better quality than the old wiki docs which are what you seem to have looked at.