YAPWF: Aaron Swartz's web.py released

January 03, 2006

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.

Adam Hayward commented on Wed Jan 4 06:01:11 2006:

Sorry for the off topic post, but I really dislike the way you use strikethoughs to denote visited links.

Thanks for the news about web.py!

Paul commented on Wed Jan 4 08:57:00 2006:

I really dislike the way you use strikethoughs to denote visited links

Noted – I may go back to color change instead.

And you’re welcome!

Anonymous commented on Wed Jan 4 09:08:23 2006:

yeah, nice post … but damn I hate those strikethrougths too

Raymond Lutz commented on Wed Jan 4 20:22:00 2006:

Just to point to this YAPWF: spiffy from Wilfredo Sanchez, http://www.wsanchez.net/blog/archives/000091.html

’ haven’t check it…