On Wed, 13 Jun 2012 12:17:12 +0200, Gilles wrote: > Thanks for the longer explanation. With so many frameworks, I'd like to > know what benefits they offer as compared to writing an application from > scratch
Surely the obvious answer is that a framework offers the benefit that you don't have to write the application from scratch. Why write in Python instead of creating your application from scratch written in assembly? Because you get the benefit of 40+ years of collective programming language design experience, 10+ years of collective Python experience, tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of carefully debugged and tuned code, and a large community of users with experience in the language, books, training courses, etc. whom you can call on for advice (free or paid consulting) and as a pool of would-be employees if you need to hire developers. You wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) even *consider* writing your own language unless you had really good reason, and no other existing language would do. Web frameworks are similar: you get tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of carefully debugged and tuned code, and a community of users, books, etc. Unless your needs are minuscule, writing your application from scratch will end up duplicating much of the framework, only (let's be realistic here) badly. By the time your application is as stable, debugged and tuned as as existing framework, you will have spent probably in excess of ten person-years. At which point, you have a community of one, yourself. (Or possibly you and a handful of your fellow project members.) For anything but the smallest web applications, where no framework is necessary, and the very largest, if no existing framework will do, why would you even consider reinventing the wheel? -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
