Hi All, Last weekend I had participated in the startup weekend Dublin ( http://dublin.startupweekend.org/) as a back end dev. I had shown my team how easy it is to use web2py if compared with Java or PHP. Few persons were not convinced and were proposing to use phpcake... So I gave a quick demo, starting from downloading web2py from the official website, I created a model with some validations, a simple CRUD and a page with some query (used later as json for a JS library). After that quick demo we decided to use it for the whole weekend. People (none of them had never used web2py before) gave good feedback ! At the end of the weekend, most of the effort was dedicated to the UI as the BE (web2py) had few actions in a single controller and the longest action had around 10 lines of code.
The positive feedback that I perceived from people were: it is very easy to create CRUD with good validation; Very easy to change a model without the need of modifying the DB (migration is lovely); It is so easy to create a json/xml service and it can also been displayed as html ! auth/registration is provided out of the box. It is so easy to add a new controller/action. It works in GAE without modifying the code ... On the other hand, the criticism could not be avoided... the first criticism came when a team member tried to connect a new app created with the wizard to janrain as explained in the book and it didn't work (I've sent an email about that to the list). The second criticism arrived when we tried to add a map using the plugin_wiki and it didn't work. And the worst criticism came when just 20 minutes before the project presentation (that was on Sunday), we deployed on GAE and json/xml didn't work... Panic !!!! we expected a json with coordinates to display on a map.... and we wanted to show it on the cloud... so we "solved" hardcoding those coordinates in the HTML (bye bye ajax).... So the final thoughts from people were something like: "...web2py is great, very fast to learn a very clever... but it doesn't look very stable... I wouldn't mind to use a 6 months old version as long as it is virtually bugs free... ". After all, I felt that people liked it. I'll keep in touch with them and will see if in few months time we got some new followers ! I am not using web2py consistently, but every time that I use it I fall in love with its simplicity. Just wondering why it doesn't seam get traction among developers... Sebastian -- Sebastian E. Ovide
