The simple fact is that the larger Python community never really cared for repoze.bfg and TurboGears. The Pylons, BFG and TurboGears teams joining forces feels more like a last, somewhat desparate move to garner some attention for projects that never reached critical mass. I don't think it'll change much of anything.<p>I used to do development in Pylons and I've tried my hand at Pyramid, and there's simply nothing to get excited about. Even the documentation for Pyramid, which at first seems beautifully comprehensive and one of the system's strong points, turns out to be an interlinking mess lacking clear explanations of even the very basics of the system.<p>True enough, like Pylons before it, Pyramid is anything but opinionated, which probably makes it a good base platform for the TurboGears devs, but how much will it matter when people will just shrug their shoulders after looking at the landing page, and proceed to download Django or Flask/Werkzeug or, heck, Ruby on Rails?<p>Anyway, regardless of my scepticism, building new stuff and starting new projects is always fun, so hopefully the Pylons project devs enjoy the process.
Wow, I'm thoroughly confused as to which way to go with Python and web frameworks now. We do a fair bit of Python work, primarily for back-end processing (our main work is still in PHP) and we've been trying to move more to Python. I did a LOAD of research into frameworks and had chosen to go with Pylons, and then I saw that they were becoming Pyramid. This announcement obviously means three of them are merging together, but it does make me a bit nervous. I want to stick with Python, because I love it, but this is all making my head hurt a little!!! Anyone on here done a load of research/experimentation already and care to help me make some decisions :) ?
In my opinion this weakens both projects. As the ultimate goal seems to be to build a new framework based on the two, this means that every code you write today using on of those frameworks will be legacy code soon.
As the current maintainer of TurboGears, I've been thinking a lot about the python web framework world for the last couple of years, and I have been thinking for a long time that there's too much splintering of effort.<p>One choice to solve that problem would be to all join Django, which is widely used, and has an active developer community. But they have a very strong point of view about how web applications <i>should</i> be developed, and as a result django isn't that flexible.<p>So, in the end what we <i>need</i> is a strong alternative to Django that is flexible, uses existing libraries to good effect, and just works. By joining together in the Pylons Project around the Pyramid framework, that's just what we're aiming to do.
I'm really excited to hear this, especially after the Pyramid announcement earlier in the year.<p>I used to do a lot of Pylons development, and although it was a great framework that gave you a bunch of ways to do just about anything, I always had lot of trouble figuring out the <i>right</i> way. Jarring especially considering the guiding Python principle of "There should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it".<p>As a result, Pylons always felt like a big jumble of modules that were all sort-of right for what you wanted. I'm glad to see some of TG's full-stack opinionism coming into the fold. I hope all this merging will lead to something with the strengths of both projects, like the Rails+Merb merge.
Sorry to hear about TurboGears. When I first found it I was very excited to use it. I think they lost a lot of momentum and community trust with the changes made going from version 1 to version 2. I know after that I felt I could not use them because I had no way of knowing if version 3 would be something completely done over again.
For cross-referencing, this was also submitted here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2045684" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2045684</a>
A bit unsettling for me. I use Pylons on several projects, though I haven't kept up with Pylons news. I really like Pylons because it was to me the best representation of the ideal framework out there; it was flexible and easy to plug in your own stuff, it was not haughty or insistent that you do things a certain way, it did not rewrite Python's whole standard library as many other frameworks practically rewrite the standard libraries of their constituent languages; it just stayed out of my way and let me do things the way I wanted while still providing me the infrastructure to get something published to the web pretty quickly.<p>This blog post seems to indicate that Pylons is going more in the direction of most frameworks with its talk of "full stack" and choosing defaults. Is Pylons going to become a reimplementation of Django? It's a little weird. I don't know why Pylons thinks this is better as a single project.