Spyced

I said that it would be possible to build a django-style admin interface for Pylons using FormAlchemy . (That is, generate a UI for basic CRUD operations for all your models, with no further configuration necessary.) I have a proof of concept in FA svn; it's missing some obvious features like internationalization so there is no official release yet. But the basics are there, so in the meantime, if you'd like to kick the tires , just install FA from svn and give it a try. Here are some screenshots from a pylons app incorporating models from the FA test suite. (The admin controller is fully customizable using standard FA (and Pylons) techniques, but these are what you'd see out-of-the-box.) Index: Order page: Creating a new Order: Deleting an Order: The User page: Editing a User instance: Documentation on using and customizing the pylons admin app is here .

A little background: a few months ago, I went looking for a web framework that was good at automating CRUD (create/retrieve/update/delete) against an existing database schema. I tried django but its database introspection abilities are beyond feeble, and django-sqlalchemy was not mature enough. I tried dbmechanic but its dozen-plus dependencies, most of which were alpha-quality, gave me pause; so did its basic architecture on top of toscawidgets, which I think is The Wrong Way to build web apps. (I understand that the former problem has since been reduced; the latter has not.) So, I went back to option #3, FormAlchemy . I knew SQLAlchemy could reflect very hairy schemas indeed, and what it could not reflect, it could certainly represent with a little manual help. And FormAlchemy was a decent start to automating CRUD with SA models. I added the ability to represent relations, automatic syncing of form input back to SA objects, Grid support, and a test suite. Then Gael came alo...