This post started as an incredibly long winded essay, but halfway through I decided that was a terribly bad idea, so I've trimmed it down dramatically, and put it in the third person (for humor's sake).
Once upon a time a boy named Hypothetical programmed in PHP and made many a web application. It would be a long while before he would find Python, and since that time he would have no desire to ever touch PHP again. He would, however, be compelled to write a web application again, but in Python now, of course. He would read the documentation of Nevow, Zope, and Quixote, and would find none of them to his liking because: * They had a learning curve, and he was not at all interested, being eager to fulfill his new idea for the web app. It was his opinion that web programming should feel no different from desktop programming. * They required installation (as opposed to, simply, the placement of modules), whereas the only pythonic freedom he had on his hosting was a folder in his /home/ dir that was in the python system path. * See the first point, over and over again. All he really wanted was something that managed input (i.e. get, post) and output (i.e. headers: "Content-type:"), and he would be satisfied, because he wasn't an extravagant programmer even when he used PHP. Python using CGI, for example, was enough for him until he started getting 500 errors that he wasn't sure how to fix. He is also interested in some opinions on the best/most carefree way of interfacing with MySQL databases. Thanks for your time, -- Daniel Bickett dbickett at gmail.com http://heureusement.org/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
