Yesterday I mentioned James Bennett’s discussion of the two camps of Python framework design. Ian Bicking has responded to James and seems to disagree.

Quoth Ian in his Full Stack vs. Glue post:

In a recent post on Framework design James Bennett describes as a fundamental dichotomy in framework design
“full-stack” vs. “glue”. In this case, Django (which James works on) as a full-stack framework, and TurboGears and Pylons as glue frameworks. This is not a good way to describe the differences.

He then discusses “awkward glue and easy glue”, the “intent” of the pieces, and “coupled” versus “decoupled” frameworks. Read the whole thing.

I have to admit that I tend to agree more with James on this one.

Sure you can get all nuanced and discuss the subtle differences in terms for each program design element… but when it comes down to it, the glue vs. full-stack gets the point across. For better or worse, some frameworks glue together existing parts (e.g. TurboGears and Pylons), and some write the whole thing from the ground up as a full-stack (e.g. Django).

There is nothing inherently wrong with either approach. And if you ask me, having two competing ideas is a Good Thing. I’d expect the invisible hand to deliver us even better frameworks in the future. So does the nomenclature really matter?

James Bennett’s The B-List is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs. Today he has a very clear-headed post regarding Python web framework design. It’s long, but if you are at all interested in the TurboGears vs. Pylons vs. Django debates… it is well worth reading the whole thing.

Simon Willison links to a technical comparison of TurboGears and Pylons by Ian Bicking.

Quoth Ian:

You’ll note there’s not a lot of high level philosophical differences. And I don’t think I glossed over that — they just aren’t there. The details of their differences are very… detailed. Very technical, very specific, often not particularly intentional. I’d have a hard time describing the technical differences in a meaningful way to someone who didn’t already know something about Python web development.

A well done comparison overall.

Related: Too much politics for programmers

Mark Ramm is asking for volunteers to help improve the TurboGears FAQ.

Patrick Thomson has written an article called How to Beat Rails that outlines some ways that Python can “beat” Rails at the web application framework game.

It’s been getting quite a bit of buzz lately, and I’d be very curious to hear what others (i.e. real developers) had to say about it.

Quoth Ryan Tomayko:

As the original and primary author of Kid, I’m extremely happy to now endorse Genshi as the state of the art in XML based templating. By all accounts, it is a superb system that takes Kid to another level and has already grown an impressive community.

Read the whole thing.

Quoth Kevin Dangoor:

I am pleased to announce TurboGears 1.0b1, which now supersedes the 0.8.9 release as the preferred TurboGears release. Many people have been using the TurboGears 0.9x releases for several months now and have been very happy with the results. The 1.0 APIs are stable and we’re focused on bugs and docs for the final 1.0 release. This is a bugfix release over 0.9a9.

I guess he didn’t give up just yet. ;)

Quoth Kevin Dangoor (of TurboGears):

I guess I’d better give up now. Guido announced at SciPy that Django is the “standard” web framework for Python. How’s that for a first two sentences of a blog post? Of course, only one of those two sentences is accurate.

Read the whole thing.

The cover of the TurboGears book (previously mentioned) has a lightsaber on it? Um… ok.

Now where is that Django book?

Kevin Dangoor points out that the new TurboGears resdesign is live. Unfortunately it looks like the stylesheets are all wonky for a lot of people… including me.