Hi, I've been trying out web2py for the past 2 weeks. I developed mostly on Ruby on Rails in the past, some CakePHP, some Lift/Scala, and Django. Frankly, web2py has been a pleasant experience. Web2py has an awesome community. The push towards Google App Engine is just wonderful. However, there are still weaknesses to address.
1. There is no standard testing solution. Doctests are not sufficient enough for good code coverage. If we are trying to educate on modern software practice, the community should emphasize testing. Testing allows new developers to understand the framework better and build more solid software. If you can test, you understand what the code is doing. The Ruby on Rails community has done an excellent job in this regard providing a standard test framework covering unit and functional tests which web2py should strive for. Maybe unittest or pyunit should be integrated with the core. jonromero seems to have a good starting point http://web2pyslices.com/main/slices/take_slice/67 and maybe we can push his solution further to be able to run all tests in every application instead of a single application. 2. The models folder is confusing. Many times, db.py is abused. It seems that db.py should not be in the "models" folder. It just seems necessary to make a standard "config" folder with subfiles "db.py" to be only database configurations and not table definitions of the models, create a "config.py" to be Global variable and module configuration for the specific application. A routine I have been trying is to put a models.py in the models folder kind of like Django which feels unsatisfying. It's very hacky and just makes the models folder seem useless. Naturally having a models folder, I want to emulate the ORM way of things aka "table_name" with "table_name.py" with the table definition and a virtualfield class implementation which just isn't allowed because the files are loaded alphabetically. 3. Conventions should be emphasized more. A lot of times when new to a framework, a newbie produces a great amount of hacky code due to lack of conventions. For instance, the static folder is very unorganized. A better convention for a newly created app should add a stylesheets, images, and javascripts subfolder which a lot of other frameworks follow. We can address this by supporting web2pycasts.com which I believe is translated in Brazilian at the moment. web2pycasts.com should expand to more audiences. 4. Controllers don't seem to have a clean way to implement before and after filters. Maybe web2py needs to incorporate the idea of inheritance controllers like Rails. 5. Admin should be fixed to work on Google App Engine. It's too beautiful of an application to be inaccessible on Google App Engine. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Hopefully, some of these suggestions can push web2py to be a better framework.
