Hi Sententia, Welcome. A few thoughts below...
I was wondering if someone from this user group could give a practical > and straight response about the future development of this framework > and it's ability to be flexible? > Could you be a little more specific? What do you want to know about future development, and what do you mean by being "flexible"? Development of web2py is very active (typically multiple commits per day, and a new release about once a month). It has been developed for over four years, has an active and passionate user community, and a large number of contributors, so I'm sure it will be under active development for a long time to come. It's also very open and fairly informal, so if you have ideas and want to get involved, it's very easy to make contributions yourself. > I've spoken on the IRCs > and asked a few people and they have shot web2py down quite heavily. > I don't know what was said in those particular chats or who was involved, but I have seen that kind of talk in other places. In my experience, most of it is FUD, and those spreading it typically have never actually used web2py. In many cases, they themselves have some kind of stake in alternative frameworks. When challenged to provide evidence or details, they often disappear from the conversation. To be sure, web2py does do some things differently from other Python frameworks. In particular, it is willing to forego some (mostly unhelpful) "explicitness" in favor of making development quicker and easier. Without ever trying web2py, some "Pythonistas" imagine that this causes all kinds of trouble, but they ignore the evidence of thousands of happy users who are not in fact experiencing these hypothetical problems in actual real world usage. Anyway, if you want to discuss any particular criticisms you have heard, we'd be happy to weigh in. > If I know the framework which I'm going to use is flexible with a > bright future, I can add my extensions to work with it and know that > it wont be a dead end. > I don't think you'll have to worry about that with web2py. I think you'll also find the web2py community to be a particularly welcoming and helpful one. > Also, why is there 14 people in #web2py but 149 people #pyramid? Why > is a framework which is so known, so unfollowed? > For whatever reason, web2py folks tend not to be big on IRC and instead primarily come to this forum for discussion and support. Note, the web2py Google group (which is growing steadily) has 30% more members than the Pyramid group and posts nearly 10 times as many messages -- so I think overall our community is probably even more active. Also, web2py was recently rated best among six Python web frameworks<http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/pillars-python-six-python-web-frameworks-compared-169442>by InfoWorld, and received an InfoWorld Bossie Award<http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/bossie-awards-2011-the-best-open-source-application-development-software-171759-0¤t=10&last=9#slideshowTop>for best open source development software. Hope that helps. Best Regards, Anthony
