Pylons - another great tool for my programming toolkit

In a previous post I mentioned that I had been looking at Pylons, a WSGI enabled web framework and had a project that would be a good fit. Finally have found some time to start work on it and my experiences with Pylons so far have been good. I picked Pylons for a number of reasons:

• WSGI enabled
• Uses Paste
• Not aligned with any particular ORM
• Support of different template packages via Buffet
  
• Reasonable documentation to get you started
  

I originally had concerns about learning yet another template syntax - Myghty, Pylons default template package, but have found it easy enough to learn and use. So one of the reasons I choose Pylons - support of different template packages really has no substance. But some of the other things I have discovered while using Pylons certainly should be added to the reasons list. Both of them are re-implementations of Rails functionality.

• Routes - makes it easy to create nice and concise URL's like http://timesheets.com/user/fred-smith/edit. No more ugly http://timesheets.com/user-edit.html?name=fred-smith
  
• WebHelpers - functions that simplify web development with template languages by providing common view patterns in re-usable modules. In addition to the Rails webhelpers, there helpers for HTML generation and pagination for collections and ORMs.

And if you are not interested in using Pylons, both these packages can be used standalone.

As I progress with my project, I am sure there will be more posts about my Pylons experiences.