On Sun, 2010-11-14 at 13:54 -0800, BrianTheLion wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've been away for a while and am trying to come up to speed on some
> pretty significant developments in the pylons community. I've spent
> considerable time with the pyramid docs in the last week but have
> failed to find an answer to one very important question: If your goal
> (like mine) is to build web apps, what reasons do you have to switch
> to pyramid?
> 
> Let me engage in a bit of flame-fanning here just to make a point. As
> of right now, pyramid and pylons (v1.0) are, effectively, competing
> technologies. They are competing for the mindshare amongst Python web
> application developers. When our BDFLs tell us that pyramid is an
> improvement over pylons, I believe them but I don't particularly care.
> As an app-dev, I am pretty much agnostic to things like pylon's
> extensibility model (http://docs.pylonshq.com/faq/
> pylonsproject.html#why-not-just-continue-developing-the-pylons-1-0-
> code-base). What I care about is how quickly and easily I can get my
> app up and running, how easy it will be to support and maintain.
> Bottom line, I think the BDFLs have punted on making a pro-pyramid
> technical argument to their app-devs, maybe because there isn't one to
> be made.
> 
> Flame-fanning finished. And I was lying about not caring. *I BELIEVE*
> and I want to see pyramid go forward. But in the end app-devs are the
> least of pyramid's worries; we're always looking for excuses to learn
> new things. Middle managers are much more difficult to convince.
> Hence, I'm calling for some management-friendly pro-pyramid
> propaganda: https://github.com/Pylons/pylonshq/issues/issue/2. If
> you're an app-dev trying to figure out how you're going to convince
> your manager to let you learn pyramid, bump it up!

By way of apology: Pyramid was "released" (more like escaped) a lot
earlier than we would have liked.  Though the codebase and docs were
ready very quickly (because Pyramid is basically a rebranding of an
existing web framework named repoze.bfg), lots of the infrastructure
surrounding it was not as baked as we would have liked it to be.  For
example, if you look at pylonshq.com right now, there's no mention of
Pyramid.  Effectively, we made the mistake of putting the codebase up on
Github, which forced us to announce the project earlier than we would
have liked to, because the cat was out of the bag for all to see.  If we
hadn't made an announcement, even though we weren't really fully
prepared, it would have left a lot of people a lot more confused than
they are right now.

Apologies aside, to your point, though: yes, we should have some sort of
suit-friendly decision-tree-ish thing that allows people to make a
choice between Pylons and Pyramid.  We don't, and that's a shame (see
above).  However, despite having fairly polished documentation, and a
long history, Pyramid is still technically alpha software and may change
arbitrarily across alpha releases. As a result, nobody except very early
adopters (read: not suits or folks who need to please suits exclusively)
should really be running it in production or starting new development
projects with it.  With that in mind, extremely conservative developers
(or those who need to please extremely conservative bosses) should
almost certainly use Pylons, and should not really even consider the
existence of Pyramid at all.

On the other hand, the Pylons development team has committed to Pyramid
as the web framework they'd like to spend time improving for at least
the next few years.  Part of the set of improvements will be, over time,
a set of materials that makes it clearer what improvements Pyramid
brings to existing Pylons developers.  In the meantime, though, my
advice, if you're an extremely conservative developer, or a developer
who needs to please extremely conservative bosses, use either Pylons or
repoze.bfg.

- C


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