So what is so cool about Pylons? Well first off, it’s modular. If you are a Rails user, you’ll probably know that Rails 3 is going to become modular as well. This is very cool. It allows you to select the best project for a given task. In Pylons, this means you can use Mako, Jinja, or whatever else you want for a template engine. You can use SQLAlchemy, SQLObject, CouchDB, or nothing for your ORM. This is great and, in my humble opinion, the most logical way to work. Why bother reinventing the wheel, which you will end up making square, by the way, when you’ve already got a Ferrari? Granted, the Ferrari probably also has slightly square wheels but at least you didn’t have to make it. Pylons also suggests reasonable defaults (Mako and SQLAlchemy) if you’re overwhelmed by the options.

Pylons also has a feature that I haven’t really seen anywhere else, an Interactive Web Based Debugger. This means when your app blows up in development mode, you can instantly see the state of the objects in question, as well as examine the call stack at any point during program execution. Way cool!

I’ve not used Pylons for anything other than the toy apps in the tutorial examples, but I’m looking forward to learning more. I’m fully expecting run into crufty edges. Every framework has them. Pylons (and soon Rails 3) allows you to pick (hopefully) the least crufty thing for the job. I’ll be posting my impressions as I learn more about Pylons.