Next-Generation Web Frameworks in Python

Future Directions

Can Anything "Beat" Rails?

Although open source projects do not compete for market share in the same way as commercial products, programmers have only a finite amount of time and mental bandwidth in which to assess and learn technologies. Software developers often underestimate the importance of documentation and community support in product adoption, but we have all experienced the same frustration: run into a showstopper problem, do a web search for it, and turn up nothing but similar unanswered questions. Hackers will just turn to the source code, but the majority of application developers will give up in frustration.

While there are certainly more people who know Python than know Ruby, at the time of this writing there are more Rails programmers than Django/TurboGears/Pylons programmers (possibly even combined!). Developers looking for a web framework that is more next-generation than PHP, ColdFusion, or plain CGI will most likely migrate to Rails, because of its large, outspoken, and active user base. Most of the interest in Python web frameworks now comes from people who are already familiar with Python as a scripting language or from other environments like Zope.

If any of the frameworks in this Short Cut are to evolve into "Rails-killers," meaning that they begin to steal away potential Rails developers from outside the Python community, it will be because the framework has solved three weaknesses found in these systems: deployment, stability, and scalability. ...