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Comment by hello_moto | Hacker News Reader

Yep, except nobody cares about "the rest" and Rails becomes almost de-facto choice for web-app with Sinatra trailing for the so-called "API" project (whether that choices make sense or not is not of my concern, in Java, API == XYZService.java with a facade skeleton implementation utilizing JAX-WS [SOAP, WS-*], JAX-RS [RESTful], or Servlet (Web) all deployable easily in 1 JAR).

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Well, ditto with Python and Django these days. There are other frameworks, each with their own strengths (werkzeug, web.py, bottle, etc.), but Django is the default choice.

Back when this article was written there were at least five or six Python frameworks, all competing. If Django ever starts sucking, I'm sure one of them, or a completely new one, will step up to take it's place. Ditto for Rails.

All part of the open-source circle of life :)

While some people may choose Django per default, there are also quite a lot of people that will choose Flask/Werkzeug, Pyramid or one of the less popular frameworks.

The Python web development community is very much divided into different, although largely cooperating, groups.

Django is definitely not the default choice when it comes to web development in Python and I doubt anyone seriously involved in the Django project would ever claim that.

I would disagree with that fairly strongly. While there are other choices for specific niches, for most web development Django is the first thing that most Python developers will look at, mainly due to it's user base and libraries.

i would say django is the default choice for "yet another website" with some application logic sprinkled in. I wouldn't use it for anything other than a website serving up dynamic pages. I also feel I am fortunate to not have to build those websites anymore.

Django has such numeric superiority that there is not a lot of point splitting hairs on whether it is "default." While it isn't in the stdlib and there are other good choices, Django might as well be the default, just as Rails might as well be the default in Ruby.

You sure about that? It is my understanding that Zope/Plone has a fairly sizable community. They're just not as loud on the web as other framework fans. No one will know for sure until they are all counted though.

I'm heuristically pretty sure. From my personal experience talking to people, and from some surveys or other I have casually looked at over the years, what is mentioned most in job ads and mailing lists, heuristic stuff like that. The same kind of stuff which leads people to say that Rails is much more popular than other Ruby frameworks.

I would love to see a scientifically exact census but I don't think it can be done. Maybe PyPI could roughly tell the story? But you won't get a real unique-users count unless your logging identifies unique users, who wants that?

Please understand: I am not a big Django promoter, I disagree with many of its design principles, and I don't think that other things are "dead". I know that there are reasonable numbers of people out there using Zope/Plone, Flask, Pyramid, and other things. Just because Django is huge doesn't mean they are nothing or not worth looking at. I believe Rails is significantly bigger than Django, but that doesn't mean I'm switching to Rails.

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