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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's great for building the things the authors thought you might want to build.

Just like every other "SuperMagic" framework, I suspect there's a lot of pain to be had once you step just a little outside of what it expects you to do with it.

We've all re-written Django inside of Django at least once, and thus have been burned by this sort of thing before. Personally, I think I'll wait to see some big projects written by people other than the framework designers before I agree that this is indeed the "best" web framework.

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I've been using Django for a lot of projects, but have recently converted to Rails 3 for a personal project.

What I like about Rails is that plugins are mostly pieces of infrastructure, not ready-to-use mini-applications that are hard to customize. And Rack plugins (pieces of middleware, done in a standard/reusable way, contrary to Django's middleware) are just awesome.

I also like about Rails that authentication and admin are not built-in. Lots of plugins available for a quick-and-dirty job anyway.

I also like that defining models and even querying has been abstracted away in different interfaces, and that you can use MongoDB in a similar way as you would use a relational database.

Also, in case you need to decouple the request validations from the models (i.e. forms in Django) without HTML-rendering logic attached (useful at times, but completely getting in your way once you try doing anything complicated); in Rails you can, and it looks and feels cleaner because the field types don't have to be related to stuff you're rendering in the HTML response (i.e. field = forms.MultipleChoiceField(widget=CheckboxSelectMultiple)).

Django is awesome in case you ever thought about using Drupal for a project: much more flexible and dev friendly. But it completely got in my way so many times that I actually thought about writing my own Python web framework; which I shouldn't because people have been working on web-related stuff for the past 20 years.

>And Rake plugins (pieces of middleware, done in a standard/reusable way, contrary to Django's middleware) are just awesome.

I think you mean Rack plugins (noted b/c Rake is something entirely different in Ruby parlance).

Yes, thanks: it's a common misspelling that I make.

And Rake plugins (pieces of middleware, done in a standard/reusable way, contrary to Django's middleware) are just awesome.

I think you're talking about rack middlewares. Rake is the Ruby make.

> But it completely got in my way so many times that I actually thought about writing my own Python web framework; which I shouldn't because people have been working on web-related stuff for the past 20 years.

You could always try Flask or Pylons.

Pylons is in maintenance mode, Pyramid is succeeding it.

Pylons is dead. The authors moved on to Pyramid after declaring Pylons core too difficult to maintain. The upgrade path to Pyramid is "Run your pylons app inside pyramid as you rewrite it from scratch [into our new shiny framework we promise not to abandon]!"

You're not forced to use the Forms class in Django. You can process and output forms manually; that part never felt natural to me so I just skipped it and work with them like I do in PHP.

Agreed that things like forms in django really steps in when more customization is needed. You with have it useful for you or you need to completely throw the whole stack away. In rails you can have them separated and just use a bit of the magic (well rails used to have the magical prototype + script.aculo.us, but they managed to rip that away)

I don't know much about Lift, but I believe foursquare.com is using it.

A framework's website needs a list of links to sites that are using it.

You mean like this web framework's website has?

http://www.liftweb.net/

I see four random logos on the front page but I can't find a complete list anywhere.

At the end of every release notice they put a list. It is in no way complete though.

http://lift.la/ann-lift-22-release

Depends on your definition of pain. I've found the full stack of Lift features quite accessible, if at times somewhat poorly documented (but the group is quite excellent for these situations), from the basics to situations where I needed to short-circuit most of the Lift handling pipeline entirely to serve up something specific.

As for big projects, well, Foursquare is written in Lift.

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