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Creole is Dead, Long Live Python
I have recently spoke with Hans (the creator of Creole) and we are in agreement that Creole is a dead project. I believe the current code base, including the beta that never got pushed to production, is pretty stable. However, I have chose to move to Python, mostly because of a frustration with PHP leadership and what appears to me to be a lack of focus and the difficulties I have encountered with the way PHP leadership handles bug reports. There are definitely a lot of drawbacks to Python web development, namely the fact that there are so many choices and that you have to work on a much lower level to get things to work (oh, and the docs are really bad when compared to PHP). But the benefits so far have far outweighed the drawbacks and I much prefer the perspective of the Python leadership and community.
Hans responded to my initial email concerning Creole being dead with the following:
Yeah, I think you're right. I don't see a huge market for creole in the PHP world, but more importantly, like you, I'm not so concerned as I'm increasingly moving away from PHP...
Please do send out a message / create news item to that effect. I encourage you to mention your move to Python as motivation too :) -- Maybe as more developers do leave PHP to look for something more serious or "enterprise-ready" it will help the PHP leadership realize that there's more required to having a successful web platform than momentum.
I definitely have found the language of Python to be extremely refreshing. I would agree that putting Python to work for web applications has been harder, especially because there are many choices (and that Python in itself is far more flexible than PHP). I think the consistency of the language and the deliberate nature of the leadership is extremely attractive, though. And that flexibility in implementation was one of the reasons we chose python (over, say, Ruby).
Furthermore, he wrote an email that highlights some of the frustrations he has had with PHP and why he is moving to Python:
http://propel.tigris.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=3480
If you are interested in Python web development, take a look at the following projects:
- http://pylonshq.com/
- http://djangoproject.com/
- http://turbogears.org/
- http://www.sqlalchemy.org/
- http://code.google.com/p/pysmvt/ (nothing really there yet, but stay tuned, its a Python web framework I am working on)
Creole repositories will remain active, but development will not.
Moving on,
Randy Syring
