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Patch available here.

Quit the hype allready. There are at least 3 oss web packages out there that are better in more than just a few aspects:
django ( http://www.djangoproject.com/ )
Symfony ( http://www.symfony-project.com/ )
Zope ( http://www.zope.org/ )
Zope is by far the oldest and most sophisticated. Django is Rails done right and in Python and Symfony is a PHP metaframework that includes Propel and some other third party goodies with tons of very neat PHP 5 foundation work. Each one of these kick Rails up and down the street when it comes to ease of use, ease of deployment, available documentation and performance (Zope may be a little slower, but they have a full-blownobject relational DB built in that makes SQL look like peek and poking a c64 back in 1985).
And since the Ruby on Rails people use PHP to power their Rails website (oh, the irony; http://rubyonrails.org/index.php ) I'd trust in even PHP being able to perform more than good in the newest lineup of Frameworks.

So quit the rails-only hype allready, it's anoying.

Django and Turbogears are the two main python web frameworks. Of the two I personally prefere Django, but Turbogears seems to have more momentum and developers behind it.

• Turbogears. Turbogears may become the choice for webapps with more complicated database requirements, eg apps that require a relational algebra engine rather than a simple object store, given their ongoing work to integrate the SQLAlchemy DB layer.
• Django also looks good
• web.py for a lightweight framework.

I agree that using Python as the "P" of a "traditonal" LAMP stack isn't straight-forward. There are tons of Python-based web frameworks, and the mere choice procedure can be difficult to tackle. Pure mod_python may be the "proper" way for a traditional LAMP-approach. However, I really suggest using TurboGears http://www.turbogears.org/ or Django http://www.djangoproject.com/. At least the former will get you going quicker than most frameworks (and is at least on par with RoR IMHO). Perhaps these frameworks belong to a "post-LAMP era" though..

Python programmers can get the same kind of experience without learning a new languge with Django. Yes there are differences to RoR but the productivity gains are there. Django gives you database/object linkage, templates, views and all that, and a free and very very usable database interface generated from your model spec.

  Oh, of course there's a big backlash against web frameworks these days isn't there?

Perhaps Web 2.0 is tired?

No, PHP is tired. It's now all about Ruby, Python, LISP, and the more obscure but no less interesting Lua, Scala, Qi, OCaml, among others, and various derivatives and frameworks.

I haven't heard much about Ruby since the (geek) media blitz of over a year ago. How many people actually use Ruby on Rails? I see the same thing happening with AJAX.

It's bad for publicity, but a lot of development with the new generation of web frameworks is taking place behind corporate firewalls and under NDAs. Some frameworks do advertise lists of public websites which use them, though. :)

What I missed in rails most is proper support -- and that includes decent scaffold generation support -- for what is the most frequent case in nearly every non-trivial database application: many-to-many relationships.

Many-to-many relationships? Rails may or may not have them (been a while since I last played with it), but Django most certainly does. We don't have "scaffolding" (though somebody's submitted a patch to do something similar), but we do give you a ready-to-go administrative interface built from introspecting your models, and it's got some nice tricks for displaying many-to-many relations. We also give you a lot of other useful stuff like generic views pre-written to handle most common tasks (CRUD, date-based object listing and navigation, etc.) so you just need to write templates and hook up to them; Django was extracted from the codebase of several large content-oriented sites, so it's really good at that sort of thing.

Disclaimer: I work for the company which originally developed Django. Though I didn't work there at the time; I applied because I liked Django and wanted more opportunities to work with it.

What I missed in rails most is proper support -- and that includes decent scaffold generation support -- for what is the most frequent case in nearly every non-trivial database application: many-to-many relationships.

Many-to-many relationships? Rails may or may not have them (been a while since I last played with it), but Django most certainly does. We don't have "scaffolding" (though somebody's submitted a patch to do something similar), but we do give you a ready-to-go administrative interface built from introspecting your models, and it's got some nice tricks for displaying many-to-many relations. We also give you a lot of other useful stuff like generic views pre-written to handle most common tasks (CRUD, date-based object listing and navigation, etc.) so you just need to write templates and hook up to them; Django was extracted from the codebase of several large content-oriented sites, so it's really good at that sort of thing.

Disclaimer: I work for the company which originally developed Django. Though I didn't work there at the time; I applied because I liked Django and wanted more opportunities to work with it.

You know a thing is superhyped when v1.1 is mentioned on slashdot.
Mind you RoR is cool compared to j2EE. Then again, it's allmost as if C is cool when compared to J2EE. J2EE sucks big time for server side web - even the Java Gurus agree on that. End of discussion, no news here.
But RoR isn't the end all of ssi frameworks. Django is at least as good (I'd say better and cleaner than RoR) and Zope has been around since the ninties and still is years ahead of the rest. People with an overview over the technologies generally agree on that. I had a story submission (rejected) on that the other week. Check out the linked webcast, it's a very interessting analysis of a set of technologies and solutions:

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Nasa/JPL Web Framework Shootout

In an educative and entertaining webcast, Sean Kelly, a Nasa/JPL software engineer, goes into the details of a project based comparsion between a set of web application frameworks and servers. Including the much hyped Ruby on Rails and Django. Various Java technologies, Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears and Zope are covered. Details and traits of each are mentioned. For people involved with web developement there are not to many suprises though, yet the presentation and Kellys commenting are fun to watch.
In a nutshell: EJB, Hibernate and various other Java flavours fail spectacularly, Zope scores a clear victory with Django, RoR and TurboGears relatively close behind. Development speed, error-gotchas, the need for hand-tweaking and the requirement of handwritten SQL and available documentation go into the measuring. As does an overall tongue-in-check "fun-factor". The details are interessting though. TurboGears 'error-driven' developement gets a positive review, RoRs automated controller generation aswell and Zope gets a complete rundown on it's astounding set of features. In the end long-time Java developer Kelly convinces us that - no matter what we do - we really, positively, don't want to use EJB or Hibernate for this kind of stuff. Very entertaining and informative indeed.
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I've volunteered to create a recipe-wiki-site-thing for a friend, and coming from a background in C and SQL there was just too steep a curve to map a procedural train of thought and pre-planned SQL onto the Rails way of doing things. I already created the database schema, wrote all the SQL to get the information I want, have a lot of HTML written for the general template, and was looking at abandoning much of it for controllers, models, automagic foreign key relationships, automagic methods popping out of thin air.. I wanted more control I guess.

So... you basically wrote the application (minus the controller), and then started thinking about using a different platform? Is it any surprise that you didn't want to switch over to Rails (disclaimer: I'm not a Rails guy. In fact, I work for the competition)?

So I've done most of the site in PHP instead. Direct, to the point, fast enough (though I'm thinking about a rewrite in C for a pure CGI/FastCGI binary), a minimum of automagic hand-holding - just start each page with sanity checking, authorization, the SQL the page needs and nothing more, and then format the output. No wondering how many hundred methods have been created that I don't know about, what happens when a record is deleted/updated (I'll let the database handle null/ignore/cascade thankyou) or whatever else Rails is doing behind my back.

OK. It's not like somebody's holding a gun to your head and saying you have to use a framework. Personally, I see a lot of use cases where a framework makes development a lot simpler and easier to manage, because so much of the tedious overhead of web-app development has already been done for you. Think of the framework in terms of an operating system you're programming for: rather than writing all your own device drivers, routines for drawing stuff on the screen, accepting keyboard/mouse input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. And with a framework, rather than write database drivers, routines for accepting and routing input, etc., you've let someone else solve those problems and you're just using the provided APIs to hook up the logic that's unique to your application. Using a web framework is no different, really, than using any other shared library.

As for all the cruft you complain about, when was the last time you used every single bit of functionality provided by a shared library you linked a C application against? Or is it only bad to draw in automagical functions you won't use when the application isn't being compiled? ;)

Hey, Guys! Get with the programm. Ruby on Rails is so last-season.
Django is where the musics at. And for good reasons too. It's more mature, easyer to use, faster in developement, less performance hungry, has a documentation that's up to date and has a grown up backend kit. It's only that they GPLd it last summer, that's why it hasn't gotten all the press yet.
And this is not to start a flamewar. Compare them both and you'll see what I mean.
The RoR and Django guys are good friends btw.

Trac is a web-based software project management and bug/issue tracking system. It provides an interface to Subversion and an integrated wiki. It uses Apache and mod_python, but it's really easy to install if you follow the instructions.

You can see examples of it in use at PylonsHQ and the Django site, both of which are styled nicely. You can see a default install at PyDelicious.

And no, it's not only Python sites that use it. Those are just the ones off the top of my head. :)

Sorry, Pal, but you're not up to date.
Rails is soooo last season. Get a life!
django is what's on.

I would love to get away from PHP and use more Python, Ruby, Perl, what have you except all the cheap hosting solutions have the canonical shared Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP setup and not much else. OTOH, if I had to setup something on a dedicated server I'd probably go with Django.
Not that I hate PHP. It's just the horrible PHP code you find all too often. Hopefully frameworks like Symfony will change that.

Also, you forgot Django in your mentions of Python web frameworks.

Well, I did not really forget it, I ignored it. Mainly to avoid the "there are lots of frameworks, all of which suck" discussion. From what I see Turbogears currently gets the most attention and is the closest in terms of "packaging" (including screencasts, PR etc.) to RoR, so I picked it for comparison.

Chriss

--
memomo.net - brush up your German, French, Spanish or Italian - online and free

Is that unless you are a web application developer, Ruby's basically got nothing to offer. Not only is Rails the killer app for Ruby, it's the only app. That makes me uneasy about picking up the language.

Also, you forgot Django in your mentions of Python web frameworks.

I think you have not seen the large amount of great development going on with Django http://www.djangoproject.com/

• Django: http://www.djangoproject.com/
• Turbogears: http://www.turbogears.org/
• Subway: http://subway.python-hosting.com/

I'd say so, too.

(Tons of people out there doing PHP, etc, but I would stay on the Java side of the fence)

Dude, are you trying to crush his spirit? PHP has a poor community and lots of sloppy code. But Java's not great, either - it has a lot of massively overengineered frameworks that require a lot of "XML push-ups". It's not a bad language, but I haven't seen a combination of it and any web framework that I enjoy using.

I'd recommend Python (a refreshingly clean language) with Django or Ruby-on-Rails. Both very trendy, but more importantly, fun to code in.

I'd also steer away from Eclipse unless you're using Java. As the parent said, there is some support for other languages, but they haven't gotten the same attention, and more dynamic languages are harder to do tricky IDE things with anyway. Eclipse makes a mediocre text editor; they don't even have a hotkey for joining two adjacent lines together. ('J' in vim.) What makes it great is what it can do with its understanding of your code. For example, hitting F3 (show definition) while the cursor's on "foo.toString()" will examine the type of "foo" to decide which of the many "toString()" definitions to open up. That's impossible to do generally in Python due to its duck typing.

django is coming out great...

I know the other frameworks are in Python, but I don't have a problem with tabs. Can anyone make a comparison about why Ruby on Rails is better or worse than these other two rapid web prototyping frameworks? I haven't coded in Python in 4+ years, has Ruby become significantly better or different than Python for web, text, and database processing?

http://turbogears.org/download/
http://www.djangoproject.com/

Thanks to anyone who has used all 3 frameworks or has any insight.

Jim

I'm using Rails for a project I've been working on for a month. It's better than anything I've used, but I can still see some room for improvement.

I've seen mention of a few alternatives that look quite interesting. In particular, TurboGears and Django for the Python crowd, and Nitro as another Ruby platform. Others exist for other languages. (I don't know if anyone has exactly defined what makes a system Rails-like; it seems to be one of those things that you can identify without being able to easily describe.)

I'd prefer to use Python, just on language preference, and a potentially larger selection of libraries to use on the back end. But I'm wondering if Ruby has some features that Python doesn't that allow a lot of the magic to happen behind the scenes without having to add code.

I'm also very interested in anyone's experience with Nitro+Og. Og looks like a lot better ORM framework than ActiveRecord.

I'm tempted to try using TurboGears or Nitro, because they look better from a technical perspective. But Rails has so much momentum that I'm not sure they'd be able to surpass Rails' community support, which is in many ways more important.

This framework looks very-vey similar to Django. Unlike TG, Django is all-in-one solution: built-in admin interface, built-in extensible template system, and so on.

If someone is interested: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/005 1258

This framework looks very-vey similar to Django. Unlike TG, Django is all-in-one solution: built-in admin interface, built-in extensible template system, and so on.

If someone is interested: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/005 1258

This framework looks very-vey similar to Django. Unlike TG, Django is all-in-one solution: built-in admin interface, built-in extensible template system, and so on.

If someone is interested: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/02/005 1258

Tried TurboGears, but the fact that it's a glue was way too appparent. I then moved on to trying Django and fell in love. All the stuff TurboGears can do Django can too, but natively.

I find CherryPy's URL traversal scheme a bit clunky -- since you connect up objects to each other via attributes, you can't see the hierarchy of your site. At least with PHP you can use "ls" to discover what your URL space looks like. Django uses a really neat scheme that binds a table of named regular expressions to callable handlers, e.g.

(r'^polls/(?P<poll_id>\d+)/$', 'myproject.apps.polls.views.polls.detail')

and the handler is declared as

def detail(request, poll_id)
...

...so that requesting /polls/13/ maps to calling detail(request, 13). Here's more about it...

I find CherryPy's URL traversal scheme a bit clunky -- since you connect up objects to each other via attributes, you can't see the hierarchy of your site. At least with PHP you can use "ls" to discover what your URL space looks like. Django uses a really neat scheme that binds a table of named regular expressions to callable handlers, e.g.

(r'^polls/(?P<poll_id>\d+)/$', 'myproject.apps.polls.views.polls.detail')

and the handler is declared as

def detail(request, poll_id)
...

...so that requesting /polls/13/ maps to calling detail(request, 13). Here's more about it...

Wow, tough crowd. Maybe Django does the trick for you? It does some unique stuff, and is python: http://www.djangoproject.com/

I've been exclusively PHP for a number of years now, but the lack of innovation in frameworks and the OO limitations in PHP have lead me to Python. Python has a great up-and-coming framework called Django which was covered on slashdot recently. I've switched over to this and can see my productivity shooting right up once I've got to grips with it

The little playing around I did with Ruby on Rails was very impressive, I understand why it's getting hyped.

Going totally OT, in my part of the world 'on rails' is an euphemism for 'on coke'. Is this widespread, or just local to my area (BC)

Speaking of Python, make that room for three.

(Perhaps even 4 with Zope, I guess)