Staying Up Late - CoffeeScript and Zappa

Over the last couple of years NodeJS has become the darling of "coding for pleasure" crowd. All that cross fertilization from the client side buffs into the server side and the server side coders ranting about the whole event-driveness of NodeJS.

Yes, it's the next big thing. Well, it's probably not, but it's certainly "A" next big thing or maybe we'll all get bored dream up something else with a catchy name... "perl for parallelism" or "Friendly Java (without the memory leaks)", or what about "C+=3" or "Oil for Android", "Lube for Palm OS". Well you know what I mean.

We see something; we explore it and once it starts getting a bit boring we convince ourselves and then our customers that we need to use some new technology or other. It's all true of course, or partly true, or lies.

Anyway, I'm not here to rant about that, after all I as guilty as anyone else.

A Messy Affair

What I want to rant about is Zappa which is my own personal cure for technical disfunction at the moment. Well that sounds real bad, but I've been doing this job for years and it's only these little affairs over the years that keep me coming home; "Assembler", "C", "C++", "Ruby", "Python", how I remember their sweet names, but sooner or later they all start to look like their mother and have to go.

Zappa is a young virgin of a technology, only now reaching a pubescent version 0.3. Essentially it's a lightweight framework built on top of known technologies such like NodeJS, CoffeeScript, Express and Socket.IO in much the same way as Python's Flask is built on top of Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and so on.

It's that Socket.IO bit that makes this one so sexy (I'm overdoing the procreation metaphors aren't I?). Socket.IO provides cross-browser WebSocket goodness which means you can do stuff like stop using the Model-View-Controller paradigm and start thinking outside the cubical with your "Model-View-Controller-View-Controller-Controller-View Paradigm" or whatever. Mind you, that's when you'll realise that MVC wasn't about limiting your options, it was about simplifying them.

Anyway, back to Zappa itself. Go and have a look, there are great examples that will get your inventive juices flowing (stop it!) and inspire you to spend a little time alone locked it the bathroom... I mean office. The community is starting to grow and the mailing list is big enough to be useful, but not so big as to be faceless and scarey.

Have fun but take precautions.

My Top Ten Python Web Frameworks

An updated version of this article can be found here.

I have recently revisited all of the Python Web Frameworks that I know of and re-evaluated them for use in a new project.

I did this first two or three years years ago and so I imagine I will be biased by the decisions that I made then, so I think it's only fair to say that I started using Django because of it's fantastic documentation and I suppose the helper scripts which help the beginner along. However, all that Convention over configuration stuff can be too much for me sometimes.

I then moved onto Tipfy because it slotted in so easily to Google App Engine which I was using a lot at the time  and the Django framework itself was starting to be more of a hindrance than a help.

One day however I stumbled upon Bottle which was a revelation. Being a micro framework it's explicit. That is if you want to use something, you make up your mind to do so; it's not some cleverness built into the framework over which you have no obvious control. If you want to know how it works, then read the code!

Finally I came to Flask, another micro framework, because I like the way it is based on Werkzeug and other well trusted libraries which gives me a some peace of mind that it is supportable, and secondly because it is also explicit like Bottle.

All that being said, here's my top ten:

1. Flask - small, fast, easy to learn and built on reassuringly supported libraries.
2. Bottle - small, fast and a great tool for learning.
3. Tipfy - built for GAE, easy to pick up and well supported.
4. Django - contains most of what you will ever need to build a website, well documented, but starting to bulge at the wasteline.
5. Pyramid - the successor to Pylons, this one has great docs and great ideas. It is a framework, but you can unpick the bits you don't like.
6. CubicWeb - like Django, Convention over configuration, but nice in some ways. 
7. GAE framework - Simple, built for GAE, and well documented.
8. Web2py - I hate it, but love it. All that framework kinda helps, kinda hinders. Give it a little time and you can definitely pull a website together, it depends on your personality whether or not you go mad first though.
9. Nagare - I admit I haven't built a full system with this one, but I have a feeling I will be soon. I'd rather it was a wee bit more mature though, but the libraries/concepts it's built on is all good stuff.
10. Weblayer - Another micro framework. Some good ideas here, but could do with a little love, If you are a developer looking for a worthwhile project, you should consider lending a hand.

[Please note I am currently updating this article here]

For more information, please read:

• http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Web_application_frameworks