I must say, this was a revelation. It looks like the author has begun a new streamlined version called Mako: http://www.makotemplates.org/
The reason I tend to prefer this sort of thing to many of the other templating solutions is that it uses native code instead of custom tokens, which are limiting. It does make for less readable code and muddies the distinction between presentation and implementation. I think it works well, though, for startups building applications in which the majority of people building it are developers. It's just a very quick and powerful way to get the thing doing what you want. The designers can then be free to do more blue-sky design work (without templating code) that can be backported into the project. That being said, it can be very helpful to have a backing object in which to hide the majority of the heavy lifting. Then you can just sprinkle a little code in the template for the final polish.
This package is really interesting. I originally was drawn to django for a few reasons: it was really well documented, it had a good use history, is all python, and was basically full-stack and took care of the annoyances on the front end (templates) and back end (database).
But this suite of tools (pylons + mako + others) seem more flexible.. thanks for the advice.
I think I'll still investigate rails, but I have reservations.
yes and i think theyve migrated to Pylons (with Myghty). Pylons before version 0.9 used myghty as its interpretive backend as well (i.e. the framework part of myghty) before they reworked it to be its own thing. Pylons 0.9.5 will also feature Mako as the default template language.
- mike, interested to see links from ycombinator in his referrer logs
