Brubeck: A new Python web framework running on mongrel2

Brubeck: A new Python web framework running on mongrel2(brubeck.io)

144 points by cfdrake 14 years ago | 52 comments

mbrubeck 14 years ago |

I must say, I did a double-take when I saw the front page of HN today.

I get that it follows the theme of Django and Sinatra. But Brubeck is not a very common name (the musician Dave Brubeck is my second cousin) and I don't normally see the musical Brubecks intrude into "my" domain. :)

jazzychad 14 years ago | |

Amazing! I thought you should know that your second cousin inspired my love of jazz as a child, and Paul Desmond convinced me to pick up the saxophone after hearing Take Five. Thus, jazzychad was born.

The world keeps getting smaller and smaller :)

LukeFitz 14 years ago | | |

Same here. I absolutely love Dave Brubeck (no homo). He really got me into jazz, and my first ever jazz piano performance was take five.

j2labs 14 years ago | | |

I grew up in the town where he lives (Wilton, CT) and was lucky enough to experience his son Chris playing at our school frequently. Dave himself played a few times too.

I first heard take 5 when I was 11 and I've been a fan of odd time signatures ever since.

haberman 14 years ago | |

I did a double-take too, and wondered if this was your creation!

po 14 years ago |

OK, now this is interesting. Like twisted or Node.js enabled a new class of web applications, this is offering a lot more than just another Rails/Django clone. I'm happy that there are so many frameworks to choose from based on your personal preferences, but I'm really happy to see a project trying something completely different.

This is the first time j2labs crossed my radar… is this part of a larger project? Anyone in the know want to give the backstory on how this came about?

j2d2j2d2 14 years ago | |

J2 Labs is the name of my consulting company (and twitter account @j2labs).

Brubeck + DictShield are both projects that have risen from building API's for startups. I aim to make Brubeck as useful as possible for building web projects a quick and easy process, without sacrificing easy scaling.

My thinking here is that a solid model should help developers build their idea fast and make it through the early days of startups without breaking their backs.

I don't particularly like working with Tornado because it offers little support for the plethora of Python drivers that are blocking only. On top of that, the callback model, while powerful, can lead to some seriously confusing code.

I believe people will find the combination of Mongrel2, eventlet and a database agnostic modeling system (DictShield) very flexible.

jdq 14 years ago | | |

"...Tornado because it offers little support for the plethora of Python drivers that are blocking only."

Could you list an example of what you mean by support for blocking drivers? Thanks.

deepu_256 14 years ago | | |

A quick question ---

can i say use pymongo in Brubeck and you are saying the blocking nature of pymongo won't affect the async nature of Brubeck ??

espeed 14 years ago | |

And Bulbflow was released yesterday -- a new Python persistence framework for graph databases (http://bulbflow.com).

lhnz 14 years ago |

There are so many different web frameworks available for Python now. How would somebody make the choice over Brubeck, Flask, Bottle, web.py, Django, Pylons, etc... I know somebody will probably say something like "use the best tool for the job" but what is best for what job?

edit; That's just Python frameworks. The situation gets even messier when you start to consider every other languages for web development. Lots of 'hip' technologies I would love to put time into learning but I can't learn them all...

jjm 14 years ago |

It's the little things that count and I like that out of the box bcrypt is being used in auth.py.

I never got around to playing around with Mongrel2 but always wanted to.

I'm a huge Flask fan and will most likely (after looking through some of the source) be using Brubeck from now on on the Py side of things. It covers the basics very well.

Bravo!

Btw, equally impressive is DictShield.

Will you create any special cases for 'modules/extentions' or will continue to keep things agnostic?

beaumartinez 14 years ago |

Armin Ronacher—author of Flask and Werkzeug—pointed out earlier on Twitter[1] that (for better or for worse) it doesn't support WSGI.

[1] http://twitter.theinfo.org/92202624614539264

j2d2j2d2 14 years ago | |

The difference here is that Brubeck answers ZeroMQ messages from Mongrel2 instead of being a web server. So instead of using WSGI, Brubeck connects to Mongrel2 via a ZeroMQ socket and reads messages representing the web requests.

Beyond that I attempted to create a familiar interface for everyone who's used a pythonic web framework before. Indeed, a lot like Flask, but also like Tornado.

* Tornado style routing: https://github.com/j2labs/brubeck/blob/master/demos/demo_min...

* Flask style routing: https://github.com/j2labs/brubeck/blob/master/demos/demo_noc...

lightcatcher 14 years ago | | |

Its relatively difficult to find maintained Mongrel2 Python libraries, but projects like http://wsgid.com/ , https://github.com/rfk/m2wsgi , and (maybe unmaintained) https://github.com/berry/Mongrel2-WSGI-Handler make it fairly easy to run WSGI apps behind Mongrel2.

I wouldn't use Brubeck without WSGI solely because I don't want to write an app dependent on its web server.

zedshaw 14 years ago | |

It's for the better. WSGI is a piece of crap. Try getting a decent stack trace out of it's weird "we hate callbacks so we did nested function calls instead of lists" design.

goldmab 14 years ago | | |

I don't understand what you're saying. What do you mean by "nested function calls," and how is that antithetical to both lists and callbacks? In what way is WSGI anti-callback?

room606 14 years ago | |

WSGI is fine if you're building short-lived, simple request/response style web apps but if you want to do any sort of async messaging, long-polling, or use websockets i.e. a modern web app - then it leaves a lot to be desired. Mongrel2/Brubeck appear to be designed with these considerations in mind.

davidjairala 14 years ago |

Love the whole idea, lightweight, fast, smartly designed. Great work.

cool-RR 14 years ago |

Looks very promising. I'm getting the impression that it has a better architecture than Django; I think that if and when it will match Django in level of finish, documentation, community, tools, etc., it might become a serious competitor.

tzury 14 years ago |

Man, I haven't seen such an efficient and clean code / concepts for quite a while.

I must give it a try at the next new web project.

Having built-in support for Tornado templates will make it much easier to transform an existing one in the future.

Thank you j2lab for sharing!

swah 14 years ago |

How does this compares to Zed's own Tir?

tzury 14 years ago | |

    TIR == LUA
    Brubeck == Python

jacques_chester 14 years ago | | |

OT nitpick: it's spelled "Lua". It's not an acronym.

grantjgordon 14 years ago |

How baked is this? Has anyone written any apps on it?

j2labs 14 years ago | |

The project is still new but I have written a complete example app and have been building a far more complex app since.

Listsurf: https://github.com/j2labs/listsurf

The more complex app implements a full social network on top of Brubeck. I think it will be called Rubik, but I'm not sure yet.

It'll pop up on my github page sooner or later though: https://github.com/j2labs