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Alternatives to Django for Python based Web Development? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
I am about to start a new personal web / iphone app project which requries the following:
Storing data on the backend
authenticating the user via openid
Generate JSON based APIs for reading and writing data
I normally use Django for all of my projects but thought I would take this opportunity to learn something new. So, are their any Python based web development frameworks that are good alternatives to Django? Ideally ones that are strong on the points listed above?
Bonus points if the framework is:
lightweight
easy to install, deploy and developwith
Any recommendations?

I've only ever used Django and I love it, but here's a couple others (I think Flask is your best bet for a very small and very lightweight web app)
Flask
"Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions."
- http://flask.pocoo.org/
Pylons
"Rather than focusing on a single web framework, the Pylons Project will develop a collection of related technologies. The first package from the Pylons Project was the Pyramid web framework. Other packages have been added to the collection over time, including higher-level components and applications. We hope to evolve the project into an ecosystem of well-tested, well-documented components which interoperate easily." - http://www.pylonsproject.org/
Grok
"Grok is a web application framework for Python developers. It is aimed at both beginners and very experienced web developers. Grok has an emphasis on agile development. Grok is easy and powerful." - http://grok.zope.org/
TurboGears
"TurboGears will help you to create a database-driven, ready-to-extend application in minutes. All with code that is as natural as writing a function, designer friendly templates, easy AJAX on the browser side and on the server side and with an incredibly powerful and flexible Object Relational Mapper (ORM)." - http://www.turbogears.org/
More Python Framework Resources
After a little more digging I found this resource: http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks/

I've used web2py for a couple small projects and really liked it.
It is pretty lightweight, has great documentation, and in my experience very simple to deploy.
I've never used Django, so I'm not sure how it compares.
A few hello worlds:
def hello1():
return "Hello World"
def hello5():
return HTML(BODY(H1(T('Hello World'),_style="color: red;"))).xml() # .xml to serialize
def hello3():
return dict(message=T("Hello World"))
The corresponding view for hello3:
{{extend 'layout.html'}}
<h1>{{=message}}</h1>

Use web.py can be found at http://webpy.org/ Very simple URL handling and lots of built in functionality but still light weight

Python Twitter library: which one? [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.
I realize this is a bit of a lazyweb question, but I wanted to see which python library for Twitter people have had good experiences with.
I've used Python Twitter Tools and like its brevity and beauty of interface, but it doesn't seem to be one of the popular ones - it's not even listed on the Twitter Libraries page.
There are, however, plenty of others listed:
oauth-python-twitter2 by Konpaku Kogasa. Combines python-twitter and oauth-python-twitter to create an evolved OAuth Pokemon.
python-twitter by DeWitt Clinton. This library provides a pure Python interface for the Twitter API.
python-twyt by Andrew Price. BSD licensed Twitter API interface library and command line client.
twitty-twister by Dustin Sallings. A Twisted interface to Twitter.
twython by Ryan McGrath. REST and Search library inspired by python-twitter.
Tweepy by Josh Roesslein. Supports OAuth, Search API, Streaming API.
My requirements are fairly simple:
Be able to use OAuth
Be able to follow a user
Be able to send a direct message
Be able to post
Streaming API would be nice
Twisted one aside (I'm not using twisted in this case), have you used any of the others, and if so, do you recommend them?
[Update] FWIW, I ended up going with Python Twitter Tools again. The new version supported OAuth nicely, and it's a very clever API, so I stuck to it.

python-twitter should cover the first four requirements. I've used it before, and it's fairly easy to start developing with it. For leveraging Twitter's streaming API, I would recommend tweetstream. It's a fantastic Python module that grabs tweets in real-time as they are posted. Based on whether you have gardenhose/firehose access to the twitter stream, you'll only get a small fraction of tweets posted. With tweetstream, you can also provide a list of search predicates to filter specific tweets that you are looking for. I used it for a project that involved mining tweets over an 8 hour period and it worked flawlessly. Both of these modules should be available through Python's easy-install.
EDIT: I don't know what you intend on doing with Python/Twitter but if you do plan on capturing a lot of tweets, keep in mind that Twitter receives myriad tweets in languages besides English. Remember to encode everything properly.

Full disclosure: I'm the author of Twython.
As such, I'd recommend using mine. It supports OAuth now, and ships with a skeleton Django application to get you up and running in ~5 minutes.
It can handle everything you're looking for, sans the Streaming API - I'm of the opinion that something like that should be implemented on a case-by-case basis, as it's generally a fairly custom setup. There's been very little demand for library support for it, either, so I've a hard time dedicating cycles to supporting it.
pip install twython
http://github.com/ryanmcgrath/twython

I've used tweepy for playing around and thought it was pretty easy and fun to use. Didn't really look that much into the alternatives however so take my opinion with suitable amount of salt :).

GAE and Django: What are the benefits? [closed]

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Closed 10 years ago.
Currently I have a website on the Google App Engine written in Google's webapp framework. What I want to know is what are the benefits of converting my app to run with django? And what are the downsides? Also how did you guys code your GAE apps? Did you use webapp or django? Or did you go an entirely different route and use the Java api?
Thanks

With Django on GAE, you get all the benefits (and also the non-benefits) of GAE. The benefits are mainly automatic scalability and high reliability at a very low cost.
You may want to start by checking out the following:
Stack Overflow: Django on Google App Engine
Stack Overflow: Django and App Engine
Google Code: Running Django on Google App Engine
YouTube: Google I/O 2008 - Python, Django, and App Engine
Django on Google App Engine in 13 simple steps
Google - Why App Engine?

As it turns out, I asked this same question:
Why use Django on Google App Engine?
It mostly resolved to two items:
In functionality where webapp and Django overlap, Django tends to be a bit nicer and/or more flexible.
If you were to later want to move away from GAE, Django is a porting goal.
My question (in combination with the wealth of information Daniel Vassallo provided) should answer your question completely.

GAE is a great tool for new and small projects, that do not require a relational database. I use a range of web hosting solutions.
1) I built www.gaiagps.com on the App Engine, because it was just some brochureware, and a tiny key-value store for the blog part.
2) My colleague also built a web crawler on GAE, because it was just some simple Python scripts that collected web pages. That app actually sends the data over to EC2 though, where more work is done.
3) I host www.trailbehind.com on EC2 because it uses a geo-database (PostGIS) which you would basically have to implement yourself on App Engine.
4) I host TRAC and SVN on WebFaction, because it's off-the-shelf for any slice there.
If I need to do a site in a couple of days, I use GAE. If it's a large or existing project, or has a funky database, I use something else.

I've recently changed my development from webapp to django (using app-engine-patch b/c they have added more features). Check out app-engine-patch here:
http://code.google.com/p/app-engine-patch/
I really liked how simple webapp was to use and it had all the tools I needed for a while. However when it came to adding user accounts on to my site I found that I either had to roll my own system (with sessions etc. which can get complicated on GAE) or use google/gmail accounts with webapp.
I didn't want my users to have to sign up for google/gmail first before they signed up with me.
Therefore I'm trying out django with app-engine-patch because they have already implemented the user functionality from django and it seems to work just fine.
With Django vs. Webapp they both have similar performance, and both offer the automatic scalablity etc.
Django has some nifty form validation etc. but i see the user stuff as the biggest difference between the two.
Good Luck.

I did some django/GAE work a last summer (see Plunging into Web Development). The App Engine Patch is a must.
The only real problem I ran into was the 1M upload/download limit imposed by GAE. I could upload larger files by using HTTP directly to S3, but I couldn't retrieve them through GAE. I hope they've lifted this restriction since then.

If you are looking other GAE CMS frameworks besides Django, take a look at Vosao. It is a Java CMS framework which uses Velocity for templates. The framework is still in alpha and is under heavy development. The current version (0.2.3) is stable and highly functional.
You can see an example of a working Vosao site on my personal domain.

I prefer webapp. It scales better according to Google and seems to better integrated with the App Engine infrastructure. Plus it's more lightweight.

try kay-framework if you are looking for framework specifically designed for google app engine.

Which Python client library should I use for CouchdB? [closed]

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Closed 5 years ago.
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I'm starting to experiment with CouchDB because it looks like the perfect solution for certain problems we have. Given that all work will be on a brand new project with no legacy dependencies, which client library would you suggest that I use, and why?
This would be easier if there was any overlap on the OSes we use. FreeBSD only has py-simplecouchdb already available in its ports collection, but that library's project website says to use CouchDBKit instead. Neither of those come with Ubuntu, which only ships with CouchDB. Since those two OSes don't have an libraries in common, I'll probably be installing something from source (and hopefully submitting packages to the Ubuntu and FreeBSD folks if I have time).
For those interested, I'd like to use CouchDB as a convenient intermediate storage place for data passed between various services - think of a message bus system but with less formality. For example, we have daemons that download and parse web pages, then send interesting bits to other daemons for further processing. A lot of those objects are ill-defined until runtime ("here's some HTML, plus a set of metadata, and some actions to run on it"). Rather than serialize it to an ad-hoc local network protocol or stick it in PostgreSQL, I'd much rather use something designed for the purpose. We're currently using NetWorkSpaces in this role, but it doesn't have nearly the breadth of support or the user community of CouchDB.

I have been using couchdb-python with quite a lot of success and as far as I know the guys of desktopcouch use it in ubuntu. The prerequisites are very basic and you should have not problems:
httplib2
simplejson or cjson
Python
CouchDB 0.9.x (earlier or later versions are unlikely to work as the interface is still changing)
For me some of the advantages are:
Pythonic interface. You can work with the database like if it was a dict.
Interface for design documents.
a CouchDB view server that allows writing view functions in Python
It also provides a couple of command-line tools:
couchdb-dump: Writes a snapshot of a CouchDB database
couchdb-load: Reads a MIME multipart file as generated by couchdb-dump and loads all the documents, attachments, and design documents into a CouchDB database.
couchdb-replicate: Can be used as an update-notification script to trigger replication between databases when data is changed.

If you're still considering CouchDB then I'll recommend Couchdbkit (http://www.couchdbkit.org). It's simple enough to quickly get a hang on and runs fine on my machine running Karmic Koala. Prior to that I've tried couchdb-python but some bugs (maybe ironed out by now) with httplib was giving me some errors (duplicate documents..etc) but Couchdbkit got me up and going so far without any problems.

spycouch
Simple Python API for CouchDB
Python library for easily manage CouchDB.
Compared to ordinarily available libraries on web, works with the latest version CouchDB - 1.2.1
Functionality
Create a new database on the server
Deleting a database from the server
Listing databases on the server
Database information
Database compression
Create map view
Map view
Listing documents in DB
Get document from DB
Save document to DB
Delete document from DB
Editing of a document
spycouch on >> https://github.com/cernyjan/repository

Considering the task you are trying to solve (distributed task processing) you should consider using one of the many tools designed for message passing rather than using a database. See for instance this SO question on running multiple tasks over many machines.
If you really want a simple casual message passing system, I recommend you shift your focus to MorbidQ. As you get more serious, use RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ. This way you reduce the latency in your system and avoid having many clients polling a database (and thus hammering that computer).
I've found that avoiding databases is a good idea (That's my blog) - and I have a end-to-end live data system running using MorbidQ here

I have written a couchdb client library built on python-requests (which is in most distributions). We use this library in production.
https://github.com/adamlofts/couchdb-requests
Robust CouchDB Python interface using python-requests.
Goals:
Only one way to do something
Fast and stable (connection pooled)
Explicit is better than implicit. Buffer sizes, connection pool size.
Specify query parameters, no **params in query functions

After skimming through the docs of many couchdb python libraries, my choice went to pycouchdb.
All I needed to know was very quick to grasp from the doc: https://py-couchdb.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ and it works like a charm.
Also, it works well with Python 3.

Feedback on using Google App Engine? [closed]

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Closed 11 years ago.
Looking to do a very small, quick 'n dirty side project. I like the fact that the Google App Engine is running on Python with Django built right in - gives me an excuse to try that platform... but my question is this:
Has anyone made use of the app engine for anything other than a toy problem? I see some good example apps out there, so I would assume this is good enough for the real deal, but wanted to get some feedback.
Any other success/failure notes would be great.

I have tried app engine for my small quake watch application
http://quakewatch.appspot.com/
My purpose was to see the capabilities of app engine, so here are the main points:
it doesn't come by default with Django, it has its own web framework which is pythonic has URL dispatcher like Django and it uses Django templates
So if you have Django exp. you will find it easy to use
But you can use any pure python framework and Django can be easily added see
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/django.html
google-app-engine-django (http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-django/) project is excellent and works almost like working on a Django project
You can not execute any long running process on server, what you do is reply to request and which should be quick otherwise appengine will kill it
So if your app needs lots of backend processing appengine is not the best way
otherwise you will have to do processing on a server of your own
My quakewatch app has a subscription feature, it means I had to email latest quakes as they happend, but I can not run a background process in app engine to monitor new quakes
solution here is to use a third part service like pingablity.com which can connect to one of your page and which executes the subscription emailer
but here also you will have to take care that you don't spend much time here
or break task into several pieces
It provides Django like modeling capabilities but backend is totally different but for a new project it should not matter.
But overall I think it is excellent for creating apps which do not need lot of background processing.
Edit:
Now task queues can be used for running batch processing or scheduled tasks
Edit:
after working/creating a real application on GAE for a year, now my opnion is that unless you are making a application which needs to scale to million and million of users, don't use GAE. Maintaining and doing trivial tasks in GAE is a headache due to distributed nature, to avoid deadline exceeded errors, count entities or do complex queries requires complex code, so small complex application should stick to LAMP.
Edit:
Models should be specially designed considering all the transactions you wish to have in future, because entities only in same entity group can be used in a transaction and it makes the process of updating two different groups a nightmare e.g. transfer money from user1 to user2 in transaction is impossible unless they are in same entity group, but making them same entity group may not be best for frequent update purposes....
read this http://blog.notdot.net/2009/9/Distributed-Transactions-on-App-Engine

I am using GAE to host several high-traffic applications. Like on the order of 50-100 req/sec. It is great, I can't recommend it enough.
My previous experience with web development was with Ruby (Rails/Merb). Learning Python was easy. I didn't mess with Django or Pylons or any other framework, just started from the GAE examples and built what I needed out of the basic webapp libraries that are provided.
If you're used to the flexibility of SQL the datastore can take some getting used to. Nothing too traumatic! The biggest adjustment is moving away from JOINs. You have to shed the idea that normalizing is crucial.
Ben

One of the compelling reasons I have come across for using Google App Engine is its integration with Google Apps for your domain. Essentially it allows you to create custom, managed web applications that are restricted to the (controlled) logins of your domain.
Most of my experience with this code was building a simple time/task tracking application. The template engine was simple and yet made a multi-page application very approachable. The login/user awareness api is similarly useful. I was able to make a public page/private page paradigm without too much issue. (a user would log in to see the private pages. An anonymous user was only shown the public page.)
I was just getting into the datastore portion of the project when I got pulled away for "real work".
I was able to accomplish a lot (it still is not done yet) in a very little amount of time. Since I had never used Python before, this was particularly pleasant (both because it was a new language for me, and also because the development was still fast despite the new language). I ran into very little that led me to believe that I wouldn't be able to accomplish my task. Instead I have a fairly positive impression of the functionality and features.
That is my experience with it. Perhaps it doesn't represent more than an unfinished toy project, but it does represent an informed trial of the platform, and I hope that helps.

The "App Engine running Django" idea is a bit misleading. App Engine replaces the entire Django model layer so be prepared to spend some time getting acclimated with App Engine's datastore which requires a different way of modeling and thinking about data.

I used GAE to build http://www.muspy.com
It's a bit more than a toy project but not overly complex either. I still depend on a few issues to be addressed by Google, but overall developing the website was an enjoyable experience.
If you don't want to deal with hosting issues, server administration, etc, I can definitely recommend it. Especially if you already know Python and Django.

I think App Engine is pretty cool for small projects at this point. There's a lot to be said for never having to worry about hosting. The API also pushes you in the direction of building scalable apps, which is good practice.
app-engine-patch is a good layer between Django and App Engine, enabling the use of the auth app and more.
Google have promised an SLA and pricing model by the end of 2008.
Requests must complete in 10 seconds, sub-requests to web services required to complete in 5 seconds. This forces you to design a fast, lightweight application, off-loading serious processing to other platforms (e.g. a hosted service or an EC2 instance).
More languages are coming soon! Google won't say which though :-). My money's on Java next.

This question has been fully answered. Which is good.
But one thing perhaps is worth mentioning.
The google app engine has a plugin for the eclipse ide which is a joy to work with.
If you already do your development with eclipse you are going to be so happy about that.
To deploy on the google app engine's web site all I need to do is click one little button - with the airplane logo - super.

Take a look the the sql game, it is very stable and actually pushed traffic limits at one point so that it was getting throttled by Google. I have seen nothing but good news about App Engine, other than hosting you app on servers someone else controls completely.

I used GAE to build a simple application which accepts some parameters, formats and send email. It was extremely simple and fast. I also made some performance benchmarks on the GAE datastore and memcache services (http://dbaspects.blogspot.com/2010/01/memcache-vs-datastore-on-google-app.html ). It is not that fast. My opinion is that GAE is serious platform which enforce certain methodology. I think it will evolve to the truly scalable platform, where bad practices simply not allowed.

I used GAE for my flash gaming site, Bearded Games. GAE is a great platform. I used Django templates which are so much easier than the old days of PHP. It comes with a great admin panel, and gives you really good logs. The datastore is different than a database like MySQL, but it's much easier to work with. Building the site was easy and straightforward and they have lots of helpful advice on the site.

I used GAE and Django to build a Facebook application. I used http://code.google.com/p/app-engine-patch as my starting point as it has Django 1.1 support. I didn't try to use any of the manage.py commands because I assumed they wouldn't work, but I didn't even look into it. The application had three models and also used pyfacebook, but that was the extent of the complexity. I'm in the process of building a much more complicated application which I'm starting to blog about on http://brianyamabe.com.