I need a new web app platform. I have to build a system that is geographically aware which points to using PostGIS as my database. The GIS crowd likes python. There are a bunch of nifty frameworks like MapFish and FeatureServer for building geographically aware applications. They are all built on top of Pylons which is more like a box of parts you can use to build web applications in python than a full on framework like Ruby on Rails.
There is also Django and a GIS extension called GeoDjango. I spent over a month futzing with Django before concluding it was a poor fit for application development. Django comes from the publishing world and is about building web sites. I need an application. There is no ajax integration out of the box, the template system is weak and clumsy to extend. While they claim you can swap it for another one, if you do none of the zillions of extensions that are out there work anymore. I clung to it a little longer than I should have because I thought that zillion extensions would save me a lot of time. Turns out, most of those extensions are half baked, unpolished, and more or less undocuented – thus worthless. I also liked The Admin and thought it would save me a lot of effort. But not enough. So – au revoir Django. You’re no replacement for Rails even if The Admin is a bit better than ActiveScaffold.
Pylons, OTOH, tries to maximize choices and make everything swappable. Choose your template system, database layer, url routing layer….. One gets the idea that the developers have seen Trainspotting one too many times. Anyhow, I don’t want to choose every little piece of the application architecture. I don’t want to design a url scheme. I don’t care that it works with 9 databases – just mine. I just want a cohesive framework that I can build in. Enter TurboGears, a Pylons based framework that tries to choose the best of everything and make it work together. I’m sold. It also has a CRUD based admin layer that is pretty sweet.
Now I just need to figure out how to build a stack for deployment on Centos 5.3.