Question

I realise that web application frameworks are well documented, yet having tried 2 Python frameworks and found that are neither are suitable for my task, I hope you’ll understand the need for this question.

I’m looking for a lightweight, “micro” framework for Python with the following features:

• Basic HTML layout management
• Features for HTML forms, tables etc.
• Authentication and session management
• Preferably integrable with mod_wsgi
• Seamless importing of packages

That’s it. You may ask why I need a framework for this at all – I don’t. But it would save a lot of time, and I’m very surprised that I can’t find something like this.

I’m reasonably advanced in Python but want to deal with the HTML and authentication as effortlessly as possible. I have a lot of existing code that I would like to be called from within the framework. I don’t require an ORM or DAL, I would like my existing classes to continue to use their own MySQLdb driver. Inevitably, for authentication to be handled, an ORM or DAL will be included, but I just won’t use it for anything other than authentication.

I have tried web2py and Grok, both supposedly lightweight, configuration-free frameworks, yet both were far too high-level.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You should have a look at flask.

• It comes with jinja as a template language.
• It doesn’t contain any ORM.
• There are lots of well supported extensions for sessions, forms, ORM, etc.