Python Web Microframeworks - Take Your Pick

You may read my post "Top Python Web Frameworks - Today" in which I took a fresh look at what which Python Web Frameworks were still around and still maintained.

In this post I give a quick overview of about half of those which I have loosely designated as "Microframeworks" - regardless of what the authors have called them. Wikipedia doesn't have a definition for microframework - I just looked - so what I really mean here is anything which let's you get started without having to learn a whole bunch of syntax and convention. Right on sister!

Let's get going:

Now that's done a little code from each -

Bottle (v0.11.13)

Bottle doesn't rely on any other packages at all, which means it's a great framework to use if you want to see all the working parts as they're all in the one file. That being said it can offer client-side sessions and compression and even WebSockets straight out of the box so it's not just a toy by any means.

Flask (v0.9)

Flask is dependent on Werkzeug for all the WSGI stuff and upon Jinja2 as a template library. It comes with client-side sessions, a built in debugger and is totally unicode friendly. I love Flask and use it often as my other posts will testify.

kiss.py (v0.4.9)

The first of the new boys, kiss.py is certainly not package independent! It requires Werkzeug for WSGI, requests for http, Beaker for sessions, Elixir and SQLAlchemy for an ORM (PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite), Jinja2 for templates, gevent, pev and greenlet for events as well as compressinja, jsmin, jsonpickle, putils and pyScss which add various other niceties. Almost all well known and trusted libraries.

web.py (v0.37)

Again, web.py doesn't rely on any other packages at all, but to me it's not as useful as flask or kiss.py and not as simple to study as bottle, so I can't see the point, although according to the site, it's well used by others.

wheezy.web (v0.1.307)

pip installs wheezy.web, wheezy.core, wheezy.caching, wheezy.html, wheezy.http, wheezy.routing, wheezy.security, wheezy.validation which to me looks like the developers have taken a sensible approach to the development cycle by splitting everything up into independent code units.

According to the site,  functionality includes routing, model update/validation, authentication/authorization,content caching with dependency, xsrf/resubmission protection, AJAX+JSON, i18n (gettext), middlewares, and more.

In Summary

No I haven't tested them to death and no I haven't even tried out kiss.py and wheezy.web in a real world app, although I will do. I certainly have not done either load or concurrency testing on them. You can do that and I'll read your blog.

Goo luck fellow traveller.

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