

Djng - a Django powered microframework - simonw
http://simonwillison.net/2009/May/19/djng/

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jmtulloss
So many web frameworks slowly evolve features that Pylons has had for years. I
think it's by far the most under appreciated framework out there.

~~~
brodie
I see what you're saying here about how Pylons makes heavy use of WSGI
chaining, but I really just cannot fathom that Django is "approaching" Pylons.
Perhaps things have improved since I last used Pylons, but there were so many
issues with it that drove me absolutely crazy and eventually drove me away
from the framework all together.

Off the top of my head:

\- Poorly written, half written, scattered, or plain old missing documentation
all over the place.

\- Poor release coordination and communication.

\- Version incompatibility hell between different releases of its
components/dependencies.

\- Incomplete solutions for basic things like form generation. At the time
that I was using Pylons they seemed to jump between a quite a few different
libraries, none of which really worked well.

\- Tons of magic that both offended my sensibilities and made debugging a
nightmare.

To be honest, I don't think any Python web framework was quite "there" at that
time, but I think today Django has far exceeded Pylons.

Also, I'm not sure I'd consider Pylons a micro-framework.

~~~
jmtulloss
I never said that Django was becoming Pylons or that Pylons was a micro
framework. All I'm saying is that features Pylons (and included projects) has
had forever keep being reinvented in other frameworks when people suddenly
realize what a good idea they are.

Pylons' documentation is a nightmare, I'll agree with you there. It's a shame
too, if it was better documented, I feel it could really compete.

~~~
simonw
Guilty as charged - I'm always up for borrowing good ideas from other
projects. That's what open source is about. Most of my favourite ideas in
Django were inspired by other frameworks (template inheritance came from
Cheetah, the request/response objects were inspired by a combination of Java
servlets and PHP).

I should probably set aside some time to build a project using modern Pylons
and find out about all the other good ideas I've been missing!

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iamelgringo
Nice work, Simon. Thanks, and thanks for all the hard work on django as well.
Keep it up. :)

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dryicerx
_Less time on frameworks, more time on useful applications/services._

~~~
tvon
If you want more useful applications and services then go write them, don't
complain that other people are spending their time writing open source
software that you don't think they should be writing, it's really not your
place.

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erlanger
I don't think this can be fairly considered a "microframework" when it depends
on Django itself...I will give it a try and look at the source because I think
that the author's motiviations for removing urls.py and settings.py are valid
(in cases) and would be better fulfilled with a few surgical patches than
"turtles all the way down."

~~~
simonw
At EuroDjangoCon I joked that djng is a "micro macro framework" due to the
Django dependency. If you look at the source it basically IS a few surgical
patches, some of which are implemented as monkey patches.

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villageidiot
Wonder if this would work on App Engine.

~~~
simonw
I haven't tried running it on App Engine yet, but I think it will eventually
be a really good fit there (and in fact it should work right now).

