I’ve recently been on the lookout for a pythonic webframework to add to my toolbag (which currently pretty much consists of one shiny-but-clunky multi-tool).

Just then I noticed Titus Brown’s article Picking a Webframework (which neatly spares me the effort of summing up features of Django, TurboGears, CherryPy etc.)

My motivation for looking for alternatives to plone were simply that I’ve come to realize that Plone really is overkill for some of the projects that I’ve currently got in my pipeline. For instance one will be a simple web-presence of a homeopathic practitioner with a simple guestbook. I really like the idea of starting with a clear table and then just add what is necessary. (With plone I always start with a – powerful – behemoth and then start stripping away… not the best way to build something, for sure.)

But Aaron Swartz’s discussion around writing his own web framework web.py has given me a valuable insight: even the lighter frameworks such as Django or TurboGears contain a lot of code and complex API’s you need to deal with.

It seems to me, that if I went ahead and tried to implement that simple website with, say, Django, I’d have to make a sizeable investment of time and energy in groking Django and still end up with lots of code but without enjoying the comforts Plone has to offer.

In the end Titus Brown decided on CherryPy simply because web.py isn’t released yet and he needs to move forward now. I, on the other hand, am in no real hurry and have thus decided to remain in the comfy world of Plone for now and keep web.py on my radar. I mean, just look at the tutorial – it really looks a lot slicker and simpler than the others. And in the mean time I can get my hands dirty with Cheetah, the templating engine recommended for web.py. Currently we create all our config files (for web-, dns- and mailhosting) via XSLT and/or directly printing to files via Perl and Python. Rewriting that crud using a sane (and pythonic) templating engine has been on my todo-list for pretty much a year already…