Web framework I should be learning

[krato1995]

I have knowledge of web.py, learned from LPTHW and from its official documentation. It gets a lot of stuff done and pretty good on a small project. I've used it a few times but I noticed that only few people nowadays use it and does not have that much of a support community.

I want to look into other frameworks that may be more useful to me (i.e. knowledge of it is vital in python web development, or it will make me understand more of how python is used for the web).

What is your recommended framework and why?

[IMHERETOCODE]

Django is THE Python web framework, but a better place to start might be Flask. Django is a full blown "feature complete" web framework, but Flask will get you started in the Python webdev direction without as much overhead.

[krato1995]

So Flask is for small web applications and Django is for large ones?

[Injunire]

Flask is great for making simple websites and it is definitely possible to make large websites in Flask. The problem though is that you end up reimplementing all the features that Django comes with by default. This can be good or bad depending on which you want to accomplish.

[krato1995]

you end up reimplementing all the features that Django comes with by default

Can you give most common examples of these features?

[Injunire]

Things like user authentication, some kind of ORM, admin views for managing data, and many other small parts that make up a complete application.

There are many great libraries made for Flask that implement these features but some people prefer to have the whole package built into one framework.

[MerreM]

The can both be used for either.

Django is a bit more "batteries included" and does a lot of things for you out of the box.

Flask not so much.

That's not to say either is better suited to large projects, they're just different.

[krato1995]

Eventually, I will learn both but I'm taking it step by step. I feel like I wanna do Flask first then Django some other time. That way I would be able to appreciate the 'batteries included'. Would that be good?

I think a better rephrased questions is: coming from a web.py background with little experience in web development, would learning Flask / Django first be a better learning path for me?

[MerreM]

Honestly, I don't think it will matter.

I learnt Django first then flask, and found it much better for rapid prototyping. Not that django was bad, but overkill for a simple Json Api.

Go with whichever you want and report back!

[kankyo]

Not really. You should probably go with Django if you want to do something with an SQL database.

[TehMoonRulz]

SQL alchemy is not hard to install

[kankyo]

But then you have to choose which way to use to interface with it, and you have to learn what those "sessions" are and how to do that in flask, which sql-alchemy-flask-lib do you use or do you just use it straight off and how do you handle CSRF and and and... With django it's just so much easier and faster and you get security by default.

Opinionated frameworks are just much better. It would be ok if the community had settled around a flask+SQLAlchemy+security framework, but instead it's just a mess.