quit smoking aids…

Successfull frameworks like Microsoft’s .NET, Sun’s J2EE implementations and the many LAMP stacks share the same single characteristics: they are profitable. Those frameworks provide a different jumpstart for web developpers, and their success is independant of the relative quality of their design and implementation. But be it PHP or JBoss, they are all profitable.

For instance, proprietary frameworks are more expensive to learn, apply or run than most LAMP stacks, but their application also bear bigger price tags. If you can invest time and money in J2EE APIs and expenses, then you can sell expensive applications to some big bank.

Any web application can be designed simpler, implemented quicker, run faster on cheaper hardware and free software. But developers are strongly constrained by the profitability of the product they sell, so unless they own and rent it, they should pick the largest and oldest framework adopted by their potential customers.

The need for a single Python framework is driven by the quest for a profitable Python version of the LAMP stack meme. TurboGear does try to articulate a ground-breaking API, but it aggregates a profitable framework out of existing Python libraries.

However, I’m convinced that a greater web framework is possible for Python.

Because the CPython VM itself has all the quality of a profitable framework. It is the oldest and most widely deployed Virtual Machine implementation. It has the most diverse set of C libraries bindings and runs on the largest range of operating systems.

CPython can also compete against Java, C# or Apache, not just PHP.

As Medusa (http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/) illustrates, a full CPython web stack can be profitable too, provided that you can ride the riddle of asynchrony, sell special-purpose high performance web servers (like http://www.ironport.com/) or develop your own framework on top of it (like http://zope.org/).

TurboGears will probably never run on the very cheapest of the hosting companies, but you can already run it without spending *too* much money. I’ve seen virtual private servers for $20/month. DreamHost is cheaper than that, and there’s already folks running TurboGears there:

http://trac.turbogears.org/turbogears/wiki/TurboGearsOnDreamHost

I’m certain the experience can (and will!) be improved so that installing a TurboGears-based blog will take just a few commands at a command line. (Something that can also be automated via a web interface, for hosting companies that want to do TurboGears directly.)

I have joined the mod_python development team about one year ago. One item on our todo list is “make mod_python a lot more shared hosting friendly”. It’s not easy at all, because you have to find a balance between having objects stay around in memory and having separate instance of Python so that different applications can’t mess with each other. That’s why mod_python can spawn multiple interpreters in the same process, but it’s not totally fool proof.

This is a difficult subject and it requires elaborate solutions ; Java does it with multiple ClassLoaders, .NET does it with Appdomains, and yet low-cost shared hosting providers vastly shun those environments. As for Ruby, well, I’m not proficient enough, but it seems to me that the problem exists – and I guess that Ruby support is even scarcier than Python support for shared hosting providers.

My point is that you can be online with your Wordpress blog on your own domain in a matter of minutes (the only slow thing is DNS updating), and that may explain the quantity of easily set up canned app that exist for PHP.

Other platforms require at least a virtual private server where you can start a daemon process. Frameworks matter in the sense that any framework that has a strong support on low-cost hosting provider is bound to “win” by popular demand.

Peter Hunt has much good stuff in Mass Transit – How Python wins on the Web and Ian has already responded with Applications! Applications! Applications!….