Practical Guide#
TODOMVC examples are an excellent hands-on practical guide to pure python web frameworks. That being said, over time, it seemed beneficial to create a practical divided into “classes”. In many cases a Class B solution can be just as useful as a Class A solution. Class A solutions are complete solutions to any functionality you might have to tackle in a world-class webapp serving hundreds of thousands of hits for thousands if not millions of users. Class B solutions solve a particular problem and do it well.
There was a recent post to reddit Python where a person needed a simple UI for uploading files and then running a process. I recommended the Class B solution Gradio and in a few lines of Python he had a nice-looking application that fulfilled the needs for him and his professor: he wasnt trying to serve up contents for millions of users. He didn’t need A and A. He got what he needed and was happy with this Class B pure python solution.
So Class A and Class B are excellent solutions. Class C and Class D are lacking in some facet but may still find some use.
Requirements of a Class A System#
that it is FULLY featured either directly or by easy integration with another framework that is fully featured. This requirements is in place so that people don’t get burned with a shiny short-term solution that cannot scale out to evolving requirements. Streamlit, Gradio and others are great for single-user web apps, but they do not provide a path for evolution into full-blown industrial strength web applications. In short: unless a product can directly, or with easy integration do everything in Miguel Grinberg’s Flask Mega-tutorial it is not fully featured.
well-maintained. anything with no source code updates in more than 1 year cannot be considered well-maintained. If there are serious outstanding issues and pull requests this also factors in.
well-documented – Ideally all major forms of documentation exist – FAQ, tutorial, Guide and Reference.
Good support channels – rapid accurate response to community questions is a must.
(New soft criteria) It must efficiently render pages so that it does not present a bottleneck as throughput demands increase. To be a top-100 web property and deal with that amount of traffic requires a complete and efficient hardware and software infrastructure. The web framework itself must only not present a performance bottleneck. (e.g. if it re-computes the whole page on a small change, then it may present a bottleneck)