About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

This runs on Django, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 58967 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

YAPWF: Aaron Swartz's web.py released

Released today: web.py. (Source, documentation, backstory.)

Even though everybody (including Aaron) refers to this as a framework, it's a lot more library-like than most of the frameworks it's ostensibly competing with -- by design, it seems. It's very compact -- only about 1000 lines of fairly dense Python. (About 275 of those are a template for pretty error pages adapted from Django though.)

Personally, I find the compact, all-in-one style very appealing. Less for a newbie to absorb and less for an experienced user to keep track of. Yes, it does require a template engine and a database wrapper to be useful, but the core is still extremely lean.

I'm very curious to see how web.py grows. Will users demand built-in ORM and support for other databases? Templating alternatives? Form validation? Admin tools and auto-generated CRUD? And as those things get added, will web.py asymptotically approach Turbogears, or Django, or ... ?

It's conventional to sigh and groan when a new Python web app framework is released. I don't know that I'll use web.py for anything beyond the obligatory test run, but I know that Aaron motivated some good little changes in Django while he was wrestling with it and birthing web.py.

In the end I think that whatever small amount of energy dissipation web.py causes will be more than offset by the ideas that it (by which I mean Aaron, really) injects into the discussion of what a web framework should be and do.

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006
django + python + web frameworks
4 comments