Pecan a lean Python web framework

Pecan a lean Python web framework(pecanpy.org)

49 points by poissonpie 12 years ago | 17 comments

codegeek 12 years ago |

I have been learning Flask for a while and any other python based light frameworks are of interest. This looks promising with its own set of conventions but one thing that immediately caught my eye is this:

    pecan create test_project

Essentially, it creates a barebone project with a list of pre-defined folders/files. For me, this is not very useful as I actually prefer to create my own. In fact, as you get to a decent sized project, you always end up customizing the structure of the app and hence a barebone structure even though sounds good actually becomes unusable. For a lightweight framework, I really don't want any app structure conventions done for me. Let me do that.

mildtrepidation 12 years ago | |

Essentially, it creates a barebone project with a list of pre-defined folders/files. For me, this is not very useful as I actually prefer to create my own.

Unless this command is vastly more opinionated (and less bare-bones) than Django's startapp/startproject, and with only what you've written to go on, I get the impression that what you're doing here is killing part of the benefit a framework gives you: The ability for others with framework experience to (relatively) quickly pick up your projects and work on them.

I've worked on several projects that did similar things in addition to many that more strictly followed their framework's conventions, and choice of framework aside, when you're using something lightweight already but ignoring its conventions, you might as well be rolling your own.

If that's not something that's important to you when choosing a framework, for whatever reason, then I can see this being OK (if not useful). But I don't think it's a good habit to get into if you are likely to pass off your work to others or need to bring in outside help in the future.

fingerprinter 12 years ago | |

I actually love this option, particularly when learning something new. I actually wish Flask had this with some options to preselect libs.

Padrino uses generators[1] for this and while they might have too many options, something like this for Flask would be fantastic, IMO.

[1] - http://www.padrinorb.com/guides/generators

nubela 12 years ago |

What's wrong with Flask, or the better question is. What does Pecan do better than Flask?

rch 12 years ago | |

It looks like they might claim: "object-dispatch style routing"

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see a substantial improvement over Flask's (or even Werkzeug's) approach.

dkuntz2 12 years ago | | |

It also looks like it generates a lot of boilerplate stuff for you.

I personally prefer Flask's simplicity of "do as you will" over "here's an entire project for you" that lots of frameworks use.

mattlutze 12 years ago |

I'm having trouble understanding from the paragraph intro on the site, why I would need this in the growing market of python-in-my-browser tools. I've used the language mostly as scripts to process piles of data -- if I were to get into generating web content, why this over one of the "inspirations" or other packages?

dorfsmay 12 years ago |

Is it leaner than bottle or flask?

It diesn't seem as clean on a first glance?

pekk 12 years ago | |

Can you be specific about what doesn't seem as clean?

dorfsmay 12 years ago | | |

With bottle, you don't need the ProfileSchema nor the ProfileController, hello world is literally 5 lines.

I know that everything is a tradeoff, bottle.py has A LOT of limitation, but to me it is the lean'est python framework. Heavy framework (WAY more features) would be django and pyramid, and midle of the road cherrypy. I'm not sure where Pecan fits in that picture.

dudus 12 years ago |

can someone name that vim color-scheme?

partkyle 12 years ago | |

solarized light

http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

pc86 12 years ago |

What use is a web framework that "includes no out of the box support for things like sessions or databases?"

pekk 12 years ago | |

Flask doesn't include an ORM either, and it's very popular. For example.

jpwagner 12 years ago | |

this is where "light-weight" comes in. you could do something like use werkzeug's secure cookies and sqlalchemy for sessions and databases respectively.