We use a lot of web interfaces and frameworks, including our own rapcms, for the formatics stuff. The deployment is as versatile too; lots of embedded devices have a webGUI to control stuff without a display. The new braintrainer ships with a web interface for control panel options and we use it in a couple of our iOS and android apps to build phonegap webapplications with a nice toolkit. That’s why we did a little bit of research, again. We use python for a lot of other projects, and love it for it’s stablity, smart design principles and readablity of the code. Pylons, django looked like very good and matured systems, but in the end web2py is probably our choice.

I think it’s possible to (re)build most of our existing projects with this new python based framework. It shipps with a lot of default working stuff, on we which already rely with our own php based CMS. I’m building a demo app as we speak and one of the things that charms me is the automatic table creator/migrator. When a table is defined, web2py takes one of several possible actions:

• if the table does not exist, the table is created;
• if the table exists and does not correspond to the definition, the table is altered accordingly, and if a field has a different type, web2py tries to convert its contents;
• if the table exists and corresponds to the definition, web2py does nothing.

This behavior is called “migration”. In web2py migrations are automatic, but can be disabled for each table by passing migrate=False as the last argument of define_table.

It’s also easy to populate a test DB with some stuff on creation of the table. I think it’s even smart enough to survive heavy SVN commits with a lot of changes in the DB model, if used with knowledge.. (it could also destroy an production DB in a couple of milliseconds).

Furthermore it has support for authentication in a modern way, NiCedit (fckeditor look a like), email support with templates, localisation and even deployment via Google app engine is possible with one click.

A already crafted an working demo with file upload and a couple of 1-to-N relations with a mysql backend. I used the tutorial from the official web2py ebook and had things running in a couple of hours. I didn’t use the application wizard to create the new app, but just the simple add application function in the admin gui of web2py.

All the features seem to work OK and the clever design makes it a joy to work with, until now.

More information from a PHP perspective can be found here: http://web2py.com/AlterEgo/default/show/106