Well, this framework shootout was bound to happen eventually. Better to do it here on the Web instead of having programmer drive-bys!

In the beginning for the Python web programmer there were two choices: Zope and the cgi module. On one hand you had a featureful but complex application environment, on the other a simple but featureless and low-level module. For a significant number of web applications Zope’s features weren’t helpful and the complexity daunting, but the alternative was discouragingly primitive.

In response to this a variety of web application frameworks have been developed in the last few years, often by developers who created a framework in the process of their own application development. I try in this paper to show the flavor of these alternatives, and to inform the developer that’s trying to decide on a framework for their application. [Read the rest]