I’ve been researching web frameworks, partly with a view to writing my own, and thought I’d share my findings. This first post will present the candidates briefly and subsequent posts will delve into particular features.
The candidates are presented based on the number of users as found on Ohloh, as a rough measure of popularity. Each includes the number of downloads for the latest release on PyPI (sometimes misleading if a package had a recent release) and the salient parts of its advertised description (caveat emptor!). All of them are open source and written in Python, but some of them are WSGI libraries rather than full frameworks.
Django (843 users, 126,426 downloads): A “high-level … Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.”
Twisted Web (136 users, 14,413 downloads [both for Twisted]): An “HTPP server that can be used as a library or run … stand-alone …, an HTML templating engine [and] an HTTP client library.”
Pyramid (aka Pylons on Ohloh, 125 users, 606 + 640 downloads): A “very general … web framework [designed] to make it easier for a developer to create an arbitrary web application.”
CherryPy (75 users, PyPI download info not available): A ”minimalist … pythonic, object-oriented web framework.”
Werkzeug (31 users, 4225 downloads): A “WSGI utility library, … [it] is Simple … And Powerful.”
Web2py (21 users, 1157 downloads): A “full-stack framework for rapid development of fast, scalable, secure and portable database-driven web-based applications.”
Web.py (18 users, 11,708 downloads): A “web framework … that is as simple as it is powerful” (hmmm … see Werkzeug above).
Flask (16 users, 42,657 downloads): A “microframework … based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions.”
WebOb (16 users, 29,664 downloads): A “library that provides wrappers around the WSGI request environment, and an object to help create WSGI responses.”
Bottle (4 users, 163 downloads): A “fast, simple and lightweight WSGI micro web-framework.”
Pesto (no users, 421 downloads): Not a framework, but a library for “writing WSGI web applications.”
Diva (not on Ohloh or PyPI): This is Christopher Lenz’s framework experimentation sandbox: “a lightweight web framework … built on top of WSGI and integrated with … Genshi.” My first, unpublished attempt at writing a framework was based on Diva.
Left Out: I had to draw the line somewhere. Compared to Richard Jones’ micro-framework battle, I included three of what he called “mega frameworks” and excluded three of his micro frameworks. For the record, here are the ones I left out: Aspen, Bobo, CubicWeb, Grok, Itty, Milla, Nagare, Nevow, Pump, Pyjamas, Pylons, Python Paste, Quixote, Spyce, Tornado, TurboGears, Webware, Zope 2 and Zope 3Bluebream. But that’s not all: see the Python.org wiki, WSGI.org and Wikipedia.
Unlike Richard, I will not attempt to develop an application with each framework. Instead, I’ll analyze specific features along the lines of Christopher’s Diva documentation.
Filed under: Python, User interfaces
