I have been lucky to be able to fill our recent open positions with people who know Python as well as Java so now we are up to half the (6 person) company in that category and preferring Python, and 2 of the others have played with Python and liked it at least well enough to not object. So the boss has conceded that it makes sense to go the Python route for our next project.
We're going to be doing a web, "next gen" version of our existing client-server project, which is mostly simple CRUD but does have 1000+ tables in its current incarnation. So we really need something that can autogenerate 90+% of the CRUD or we will go insane.
The trouble is, I still don't really like any of the Python web options 100%. (I like the web options in other languages less, but I'm a perfectionist.)
Django is well documented, its admin app is something everyone else envies, and newforms looks decent, but the ORM blows and I'm not fond of the template engine either. (Pre-emptive pedantry: yes, I know I can "import sqlalchemy." Please stop saying that like it means something; I'm not interested in defining models twice -- once for real work with SA, and once for interop with the rest of django.) Apparently django-sqlalchemy got far enough in PyCon sprints that it's kinda usable so working on that would be an option. Of course even then there is no guarantee the django core would accept it into mainline, and maintaining it as a "vendor branch" would proably suck. If django used a dscm like Mercurial I might be willing to do that, but svn is just too painful so that is a real risk.
I don't see a way to generate a page containing just a CRUD interface for table X with the django admin app. The admin app really is a monolithic application, not something you can easily re-use pieces of.
Regexps suck for url mapping.
Pylons is not well documented and after keeping an eye on this for something like 18 months I don't think this is a problem that will be solved, for whatever reasons. On the other hand, SA + mako is a very sane default, and both of those are well documented so it's really only core Pylons that suffers from doc crapitude, and core Pylons is fairly small. IRC responsiveness mitigates this further.
Pylons still doesn't have a good CRUD (or even high-level manual form generation) solution, which has bugged me for even longer than the docs. I can't fathom how people can tolerate writing this kind of boilerplate in 2008. Formalchemy gets about 30% of the way there. DBMechanic requires TG2 atm, although apparently hacking it to run on Pylons may not be too much effort; I would guess around 20% of the effort to get the django-sa project really usable.
TG2 is of course very bleeding edge and although I like genshi's syntax in theory, in practice XML templates irritate the hell out of me. (Very verbose, xinclude sucks compared to "inheritance," and incorporating rich dynamic content -- i.e., user-generated, like forum posts, that needs to include html tags -- is a PITA. Not to mention that having to write "a > b" when you mean "a > b" bugs me all out of proportion to the actual inconvenience it inflicts on me.) Still, better than the django templates.
I'm skeptical that TG2 is a big enough value add to want to add it (in its unfinished state) as a dependency vs rolling our own on Pylons. But DBMechanic does look like it could be exactly what I want in a CRUD generator.
web.py seems like more of a tech demo than a real product. I don't see any signs of a CRUD or form generator. reddit, probably the largest web.py site at least in terms of page views, moved to Pylons.
Zope 3 is alone in being really production ready without running from svn. Grok does do a good job of smashing zcml and z3c.form looks okay but lives up to the Zope reputation of complexity. (Field managers, widget managers -- are these the same things? -- widget modes, ...) AFAIK relational dbs are still second-class citizens in zope, and with all due respect to zodb it is no postgresql. OTOH there is z3c.sqlalchemy which gives me hope. Finally: you have to manually restart zope (per the Grok tutorial) after changing your .py files? Seriously?
Bottom line, Zope might actually be a decent option if we had a Zope expert on staff but we do not and I am not willing to tackle the learning curve alone.
Nevow: form handling is in flux. The new hotness is "pollenation forms," but that is svn-only and the api "will probably change."
Zope and Nevow both have their own xml-based templates predecessing but similar to genshi. Something like Nevow's Stan is obviously useful for programmatic template generation but it's not yet clear if that's going to be something we need. Probably only if we have to write our own form generator. If so, I suspect ripping a standalone Stan out of Nevow would be straightforward.
(Spyce of course never really got any traction to speak of. It's time for me to let it go quietly into the night and leverage someone else's framework.)
Conclusion: I think porting DBMechanic to Pylons is our best option. DBMechanic seems designed to be more flexible than the django admin app. Django would be my second choice.
Corrections? Thoughts?