Mark Ramm, one of TurboGears’s core developers announced on TurboGears’s mailing list that they will merge with Pylons! To be more precise, the API of TurboGears will be implemented on top of Pylons. It seems they already made some test/proof of concept that are, as they say “a huge success”. That’s really good news for Python web frameworks development, and a good news for me, as I’ll not have to choose between the two :-

As a sidenote, it seems another framework, CleverHarold has disappeared without anybody noticing. Its domain is parked, and today its Google Group page went off (the last messages were from people asking if the project was still alive).

Update: Noah Gift wrote a nice article about the merge.

Pylons is a cool web framework (one more, besides TurboGears, Django, Zope, etc.). Someone posted on the mailing list a reference to a nice introduction.

Finally, after such painful setups, I really never could find a really suitable configuration that could satisfy me. Here are the different methods I tried to implement TurboGears/Pylons or similar WSGI/Python projects (MoinMoin for example):

• FastCGI: So complex to setup, crashes on its own so often, and leaves running processes in memory so have to kill them each time manually to start again with a clean environment. I have to admit it is easier to configure on Lighttpd.
• SCGI: As complex as FastCGI and not so used in the world, but not bad. Too few options.
• Proxy: Redirecting on a local different port gives nore work, and as soon as you have several other virtual hosts, you’ll have to keep a registry of all your allocated ports. Painful, but easy to setup. Maybe be hard to configure if you’re using Zope, and if you need some remote information (ip address of the user for example), you’re dead!
• Direct Access: Configuring you app to run on a local ip alias on your machine and eventually configure your firewall to DNAT on it. Not that complex to setup, but requires access to you OS confiugration and many apps don’t allow you to only listen on a specific interface (MoinMoin allows it, that’s cool)
• mod_python: Loads Python into memory. Everybody shares the same namespace. Dangerous.

Now here’s a new contender, mod_wsgi written by Graham Dumpleton. That’s right, it will not work for every app. Zope, not being WSGI aware, is out of the way, except for Zope 3.x. But most of Python apps can be modded to be WSGI aware (MoinMoin is an example).

Clever Harold is a new python web framework (another one :-) that uses WSGI as its core glue. This allows you to define your own stack of elements (sessions, authentications, compression, templates, etc.).
It is really well done (for a 0.1 version), and, compared to other WSGI based frameworks (like RhubarbTart or Pylons), seems easier to grasp. The big difference (except it’s well organized, thanks to Paste) is that it automatically guesses the required modules, so you don’t need to specify them in your source header.
Take a look at it, and don’t forget to register on the mailing list!