It seems like only yesterday I attended the PyCon 2005 conference, which took place right around the same time that Ruby on Rails was really beginning to gather steam. Of all the talks I attended, one in particular stands out as attracting perhaps the largest crowd of the entire show. It was titled “PyWebOff: Mapping the python web application frameworks”, which was a rather ironic name (likely purposely so) in light of the complete lack of compelling Python-based framework solutions.

This was a fairly informal talk which generated a fair amount of discussion towards its conclusion regarding what could be done in order to satisfy the growing clamor. While it’s unclear whether any specific actions were undertaken as a direct result of that talk, what is clear is that soon thereafter several impressive projects were underway, most notably Django and Turbogears. Today I came across Pylons, which based on what I’ve read on the website, looks extremely promising.

To say the least, this is a pretty amazing turnaround, and indicative of how open source communities can quickly spring to action in order to adjust to market demands.

Like most Web developers, I’ve become enamored with the myriad Web frameworks popping up everywhere. Symfony is very cool, as is Cake. But the Zend Framework offers a particularly compelling component that I couldn’t resist using for a recent personal project involving aggregating Amazon sales rank information for Apress’ open source line (of course we’ve long aggregated such statistics, but I wanted to recreate my own solution for kicks).

My latest SearchOpenSource tutorial describes this project, showing you how to take advantage of the Zend Framework to create your own aggregator. While it’s not an introduction to the framework, you should nonetheless be able to follow along fairly well provided you’ve some understanding of how MVC works.

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