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Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

plainframework.com

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Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#81
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people want strong typing, but also want other things. It's possible to want multiple things, and bemoan that whwat you use is still missing things you want. Concretely, Django is way more usable than basically any web framework from the "strongly typed" space, especially for "dumb" CRUD stuff. And you're not hit with making decisions about how to do a bunch of things (though you can swap out mostly any part…

That makes sense! My personal feeling is that a web framework is not the right place in the stack to introduce typing. There’s also probably an argument to be made that part of the reason for Django’s “batteries included” success and wide adoption is in part because it is built on an untyped language. I get wanting both, though. In my own work, I find most of the benefit of static types to be ensuring correctness at…

The main benefit in the developer workflow is autocompletion and feature discovery in the IDE. Having to guess which methods and properties an object exposes, or jump to the documentation every time, is really frustrating. Compare that to e.g. Typescript, which excels in this area.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#82

As a guy with a lot of hours into Django, I will echo that I don’t quite understand the “why” here. I think there’s a number of areas where Django falls a bit short and other web frameworks excel. For example, task workers are not first class citizens and require Celery or another task manager. REST APIs are a similar situation. Celery and Django REST are great, but they do feel a little ham handed. I’ve seen other f…

Django have been by bread and butter work for a long time, and I do not really get the point of this.

There are bits I agree with but nothing like enough to be worth losing compatibility with third party packages.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#83

I don't know if Plain has a chance to succeed but I understand why it is a fork. Django leadership haven't been able to move Django forward outside of its old paradigms and every attempt, be it a fork or third-party app, counts.

Can you elaborate on this? What paradigms do you think are outdated? Generally speaking, I think Django has lagged a bit behind other frameworks. However, the continued advantage of being Python driven has left it useful in my book when working with Python data utilities in the back end. What’s your perspective here?

Active Record leads to a big ball of mud.

A lot pythonistas who only know Django have no idea that there other ways of building web apps.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#85
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because late stage open source capitalism is now bypassing the messy business of building something popular and going straight open-core/vercel-model on the back of already popular libraries and frameworks. The emerging playbook is: - Find successful open source project - Fork with "reasons" - Pour VC into helpful features, great docs, DX and evangelism - Run the Vercel playbook We're gonna see a lot more of this.

>- Find successful open source project - Fork with "reasons" To be fair, Vercel did not 'find&fork' Next.JS, they are the authors of the framework.

they probably intend its relation to React.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure Django is stagnating. It recently added task queues as a concept, which was desperately needed, but there's not a lot else that's truly necessary. The important thing for me here is that Django has a very mature extension model – apps, packages, backends, etc – that mean that most functionality can and should be implemented as separate packages that plug in well. Almost all the Plain features are either…

> It recently added task queues as a concept It took me a while to find any information on this, so for others: https://forum.djangoproject.com/t/django-tasks-bringing-back... https://github.com/django/deps/blob/main/accepted/0014-backg...

Django-tasks seems to be moving very slowly, it doesn't have database indexes yet. If you look at the problems with Celery: https://steve.dignam.xyz/2023/05/20/many-problems-with-celer... and the complicated compatibility matrix https://docs.celeryq.dev/projects/kombu/en/main/introduction... , task queues are still a pain point.

Re: Plain – a web framework for building products with Python

#89
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because late stage open source capitalism is now bypassing the messy business of building something popular and going straight open-core/vercel-model on the back of already popular libraries and frameworks. The emerging playbook is: - Find successful open source project - Fork with "reasons" - Pour VC into helpful features, great docs, DX and evangelism - Run the Vercel playbook We're gonna see a lot more of this.

Interesting. Got more examples of this playbook?

I can think of:

  Sqlite -> Turso  
  PostgreSQL -> Neon  
  Chromium -> Arc browser
not exactly fork, but aimed at riding popularity of an already-established thing:

  Nodejs -> Bun
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