Making a Choice

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 25th February, 2006 @ 14:54

Arrgh! I'm kinda frustrated right now about which Python web framework to use. I know I indicated a couple of days ago with the launch of my new look home page that I've decided upon Django. But now I'm starting to change my mind. The big problem here is the stability (in terms of API) of both Django and TurboGears.

I've setup RSS feeds for my images in Plone which makes getting them out and into a nice new app a piece of cake, so I created a model in Django to hold the information and was immediately confronted with a Traceback because of some bugs in the magic-removal branch I'm using.

The problem here is that I can't work for now using this branch, and the alternative is the trunk development code. If I use that, in X weeks time I'll have to refactor when magic-removal makes its way into trunk. There's no real schedule for when this will happen and there's not been much dev activity on either version, so I feel a little stuck on the Django route at the moment.

This week TurboGears released version 0.9a1 which I've been waiting for for a little while now. And it looks pretty nice, so I'm tempted to rebuild the home page stuff with that. One of the big pluses for TG is that it makes use of other projects like SQLObject, so the basic APIs for working with data aren't going to change much between now and 1.0. And I've always preferred the Zope TAL like XML templating of Kid in TG to Django's approach.

What I really want is a mix of these two projects, the URL mapping and free admin system of Django with the Kid templating, MochiKit AJAX library and stability of the database API of TurboGears. Theoretically with a bit of work this is actually achievable, if somewhat unsustainable with both projects in a state of relative flux.

So I think my conclusion's going to be that I will rebuild the homepage in TG and see how that goes. Learning both frameworks can't be a bad thing and if anything, it'll hopefully put me in a better position to choose one when I need something for a serious project.

On a completely different topic, if you haven't already after my previous post, go check out GeekBrief.TV, it's really fun, and will only consume 3 minutes of your life every few days. Cali's lovely, if I liked girls, I'd definitely like her :)