Ask YC: What is your take on web2py?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175609

by aitoehigie • 18 years ago

11 35 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

i am new to web2py and i must confess that i have fallen in love with it. if you have used the framework before, what is your take on it?

ivank6• 18 years ago

Have you looked at the source code? web2py is a bad joke with a lot of marketing. Then again, the author isn't really into the Python style - just its userbase. Look at Django if you want a full stack or Werkzeug if you want to roll your own; the latter can easily emulate the style of web.py or Pylons (in fact the trunk comes with these examples).

aitoehigie• 18 years ago

I beg to disagree, web2py is quite good, at least in my own impression much better that webpy, at least when looking at it from the angle of code documentation and cohesion.

mdipierro13• 18 years ago

Thank you aitoehigie. :-)

mdipierro13• 18 years ago

Are you still upset with web2py because I did not include your package. Com'on. Grow up. web2py is a project grown in a university, it is all but marketing. Unless free good documentation is called marketing. Here is the latest draft manual: http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/examples/static/web2py_manual.pdf Here is a preliminary comparison with other frameworks: http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/examples/static/web2py_vs_others.p... (please correct me if I am wrong)

webology2• 18 years ago

I'm not sure about the other frameworks listed but I did notice the following related to Django:

- Django's caching supports ram, disk, database, and memcache as well. - Migrations are supported in Django via the 3rd party django_evolution to name one of a few. - Django trunk also has simplejson included. - For documentation there are the online docs, the djangobook.com website, three published books as of today, and at least a few other books coming out in the next few months. My point just being that there is more then just one book.

ivank6• 18 years ago

I don't develop any sort of web framework or toolkit, so I have no idea which package you mean. I just don't see web2py being extracted from a large successful project, which I think is a partial recipe for success. I'm especially confused, because it's an "enterprise framework", but grown in a university.

We already have a full stack web framework with an insane amount of documentation - Django, and I would bet my money on its continued evolution and 1.0 release. If anyone is on the fence, look at the web2py/gluon source code and ask if that's the sort of full stack you see being maintained by a community.

ardit333• 18 years ago

ivan, have you actually used it yourself? What did you like/dislike about it? Can you gives us examples?

I personally don't like Django that much as it might be an overkill, and I kinda liked web.py, but the documentation is so poor and it misses a lot of features from a proper framework. Maybe web2py is the middle ground, and I will give it a look.

Dissmissing something, b/c its source codestyle is not pythonic enough for you, is a pretty shallow argument.

ivank6• 18 years ago

I wasn't advocating web.py - emulating its style was just an example of Werkzeug's flexibility. I recommend Django if it fits your application, or rolling your own stack (Werkzeug) if Django doesn't fit. I haven't used web2py because I don't invest time in things I have zero faith in.

Edit: full disclosure: I've written code far worse than this (in some ways). I just don't publicly release it and encourage language newbies to build on it.

inklesspen4• 18 years ago

Web2py is a joke. The guy wrote his own ORM, rather than working with the best-of-breed Python ORM SQLAlchemy, and he touts this as a feature. He was also quick to point out that Web2py won a rumble, but fails to mention that this was because none of the other Python frameworks had even heard of it.

If you want a good Python framework that doesn't unduly dictate your app structure, go to Pylons.

mdipierro13• 18 years ago

The Flourish conference was sponsored by Google. The creators of Django, CackePHP and Rails were on the mailing list and some even replied to it. I agree that if nobody else participated it is not a victory. I would not say web2py won, I would say web2py was not afraid to participate and delivered a working project in 24 hours that met the specs. The organizers said web2py won. Ask the organizers. Ian Biking was on the jury.

inklesspen4• 18 years ago

You did in fact say web2py won:

"web2py is the only framework that participated to the www.flourishconf.com rumble (develop a web app in 24 hours) and won because all the other frameworks chickened out."

http://spyced.blogspot.com/2008/04/m-half-baked-thoughts-on-...

ardit333• 18 years ago

inklesspen, don't all framework/orm whatever come out when a guy is frustrated with what's there and starts it's own? Doesn't Django have its own ORM?

You can say that his ORM solution is crappy, or doesn't work well, but you can't dissmiss something just b/c it is not one of the old packages. While I may not want to use his framework for anything mission critical, it seem to be a good choice for a small and app or for quick prototype development.

His main points in his framework is simplicity and ease of starting.

inklesspen4• 18 years ago

Yes, and Django's ORM is also inferior to SQLAlchemy.

If his ORM were better than SQLAlchemy, it would be more widely used. Since it is not widely used, I see no need to look into it before dismissing it.

nuggien• 18 years ago

got a 503 when trying to access http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/

fredcy• 18 years ago

I've been experimenting with web2py over the last week and I like it. Simple web apps are easy to create with very little work. I'm not keen on through-the-web code development but that's not essential to web2py -- everything can be edited directly as simple files. The code of the 'gluon' library seems fine to me. It's a very compact style of coding that (IMO) could use a few more comments, but it's at least as good as what I've seen in Zope and Plone. (Of course, web2py has not been around long enough to accumulate the kind of cruft that happens in more aged software). The documentation is pretty good, particularly in its examples and tutorials. The new "manual" is good. The one thing is miss is an API manual such as can be found for the PHP and Python libraries.

BackSeat• 18 years ago

I've tried Django and web.py in the past, and given up with both. web2py works, is nicely implemented and the documentation is starting to take shape. Good support on the mailing list too.

g-man• 18 years ago

web2py 'gets it' about developing web apps!

Massimo has boiled down the essence of what a web app needs to do (MVC, REST), and has delivered it in a clean, simple package, which is just what I would expect from a Computer Science professor.

The new Google appengine Bigtable datastore makes any SQL-based ORMs moot now anyway, so all we really need to worry about are the business logic and presentation, both of which web2py excels at.

Yes, you can still use Textmate if you want, but the cool thing about web2py is you never need to leave the browser IDE. Also, the framework itself is so compact you can carry everything around in a few megs of a USB thumb drive, so now you have a truly portable cross-platform package you can use to develop wherever you are!

So just get involved, and let's lead the way into the cloud... I see a huge need for that kind of leadership over at the appengine; this is a chance to make a real difference and shape the future, folks.

Ask YC: What is your take on web2py?

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