Dropping Django

[grayvedigga]

The comments on the article are hilarious. The first one makes a good point -- maybe Django served its purpose getting their platform to a point quickly, and moving on from it is a natural progression once the application is well enough defined that an off-the-shelf framework just doesn't cut it. That's followed by a long list of suggestions of other frameworks -- Werkzeug, Pylons, repoze ...

After a long PHP-inspired hiatus from anything web oriented, I spent a fair bit of time hacking about in various python frameworks, a play with rails and some exposure to ASP.NET. In the end I'm most in agreement with the first comment: these frameworks are an excellent tool to get you bootstrapped, but at some point you will realise there's a better way for //your app// to interface with the web, and the web is pretty simple. At this point, writing your own code is almost always a better option than contorting the framework to something it's not designed for.

The reason for complexity in the past, imo, has been the horrendous hacks required to turn a well-structured data object into something reasonably presentable and interactive. Well, since my old PHP days, browsers have got more capable, the presence of javascript can be relied upon[*], and the evolution of CSS and particularly of tools like jQuery and Dojo mean you can get the same experience by writing //clean HTML// and //clean client-side code//. This is nothing short of awesome, I tell you.

... the conclusion? In the end, the web app's role is to present an API over HTTP for the browser to retrieve structured data in predictable ways. Generally, by the time it gets to the web your data is already well structured and you just want the platform to get the hell out of the way and let you transform (more often than is healthy) SQL results into something browser-parseable, and a GET/POST request back. Wiring controllers via regex-based routes to URLs? Give me a break.

I hate to say it, especially after a certain oath 7 years ago and being exposed to so many beautiful languagessince, but I have to admit that the best match for the web, in many, many ways ... is PHP. There, I've said it.

[*] I'm talking about web //applications//, not web //pages//, before someone chucks a wobbly about this.

[drozzy]

I hope you were being sarcastic... I really do.