A clear, concise overview of Python web application frameworks + comparison methodology + results +recommendations

...does not exist as far as I know.

To get an overview of the options and the multi-farious intertwingled issues involved, you could do worse than follow the conversation happening on Guido's blog.

Blogs and Sky News

For a while now, when listening to Sky I have heard the blog word mentioned from time to time.

Today I went to the Sky News home page to find blogging well and truly integrated into the overall techo-news thing alongside e-mail and SMS alerts and so on.

When I first started blogging Anchor Men at mainstream news channels never occurred to me as early adopters...Perhaps its just that I'm behind the times. Sky are not early adopters. Just adopter-adopters, like everyone else.

Blogging is mainstream now. It has flipped the present/absent bit - i.e. it is no longer news that such-and-such has a weblog. It is now news when such-and-such does *not* have a weblog.

Acronym Alert : SEDA

Concepts have a way of only gaining currency when they have a CAA (Commonly Accepted Acronym). :-)

You might not have ever heard of SEDA but behind that acronym lies a bunch of stuff that some of us have been preaching about distributed systems (to anyone who would listen) for yonks. Hint : temporal decoupling is your friend.

Perhaps SEDA *is* the acronym that will make it. Who knows?

A perl script gone mad...

Yesterday in the car, one step up on the dial from that bastion of normalcy known as RTE 1, I stumbled upon "BLK Brain FM". Black Brain Radio - easily the strangest thing I have ever heard on the radio.
I used to write lots of Perl scripts. From time to time my regular expressions would go wrong and the output of my scripts would be...interesting. Fragments of different files all mushed together in interesting ways. A sort of Postmodern Programming in Perl thing.
Anyway, that was the first thing that sprung to mind listening to Black Brain Radio, fragments of narrative, fragments of conversations, all spliced together in odd ways. The interstitial internet.
Very, very odd but ocassionally more interesting than RTE 1.

Permanent URLs

Wouldn't it be great if by simply looking at a link, you could tell whether or not it was a good canditate for bookmarking i.e. the link will work for a long time?

How about a naming convention for permanent URLs?

How about a URL producer/consumer contract regarding permanence?

How about a food fight over URL verus URI terminology?

A URL producer consumer contract

Python on the Rails

Rails is interesting.

I remember Visicalc.

I used to be a technical sales support person in an Apple shop when standard kit was an Apple 2 and all the buzz was around something iminent called the "Apple Lisa".

Anyway, folks used to walk in off the street and say "I WANT A VISICALC!".
I would say "You mean you want an Apple 2 and a copy of Visicalc, the spreadsheet".
They would say "No. Just give me a Visicalc.".

Sometimes a concept surfs a wave. Rails is one such concept. Ruby is what is underneath in the same way that Apple 2's were under Visicalc.

People want Rails (it seems). Mostly Java people. Thats fine. Heck, if your current mental model of web computing is statically compiling great lumps of Java then sure Rails looks like total magic.

But so too would Python, and Smalltalk and ... if you had gone there.

But that is not the point. The point is that Rails is the wave.

Fine.

Ruby is a fine language in may respects. Too close to Python for me to be thinking "wow! lets go there" but a fine language non-the-less.

Especially if you are coming from Java or Perl...

But that is not the point.

My point is this: I hope that Ruby grows to be a more technically elegant and all-round-fantastically intellectually pleasing programming language than Python.

The world needs such things. I'm a big fan of them. I seek perfect tools just as much as the next guy.

But the world has a way of coalescing around the sub-optimal.

If Ruby/Rails creates a penumbra of sub-optimality around Python then what does that mean for Python?

Does it mean that Python is dooooomed?

On the contrary.

It creates some grass.

Some greener grass.

Over there. On the other side.

It makes Python a middle ground. Removes it from the extremities and plonks it in the middle.

The extremities are now elsewhere.

Python is no longer cool if you are into extremeties.

Python is now free to go totally mainstream.

That is fine by me.

My fondness and bias and vested interest in Python causes me to shout:

Lets hear it for Ruby and Rails! Way to go!

More from the "Desktop-Linux-has-come-a-long-way" category

So I needed a high quality print of a JPG...

I have an Epson 915 PhotoStyler which I have previously used from Windows...

I plug it into the USB of my Ubuntu Thinkpad.

I run the Gnome Desktop printer wizard to create a printer.

In the Gimp, I tell the print dialog about my Epson Printer. I pause a few minutes to marvel at all the functionality the Gimp provides...

Then I print...

...and it just works.

The way things ought to be but so seldom are.

Wonderful.