ActiveGrid and Python Frameworks.

[Robert Boyd]

On 5 Feb 2006 01:19:43 -0800, Ravi Teja <webraviteja at gmail.com> wrote:
>   Why is no one talking about ActiveGrid, which at least on the surface
> seems to be the most polished way to build web applications in Python
> so far. They have a sound financial backing, $10 million when I last
> heard, made news on non-Python circles, have a relatively friendly
> authoring environment and are probably addressing the enterprise more
> specifically than any other web framework.
>
>   It somehow did not grow on me but I would love to hear what others'
> experiences are compared to other frameworks they use.
>

No one is talking about it because AG themselves are hardly talking
about it, except in the business press, it seems. All that time
"addressing the enterprise" apparently leaves no time for addressing
the developer community. Other recent Python web projects have been
much more committed to buy-in from developers, with sites geared
towards developers.

They once had mailing lists which were dead, and now they have only
SourceForge forums which are fairly quiet. The help forum is answered
quickly and the AG folks on the forums seem congenial enough, but
there's just not much buzz that I've seen. Every now and again I see
an article mentioning them in the same sentence as "LAMP/Web 2.0
replacing tired old Java". But I have not heard anything from people
who've used AG in production work. Maybe the company's really taking
off and I'm just not aware of it.

I've been following AG and trying their App Builder from the
beginning. I was really intrigued by the development environment and
I'd like to see some of that technology (like BPEL and XForms) in
other Python web frameworks, even if they don't include the same
visual editing capabilities. I have not used AG in anything other than
tutorials and attempts at quick mock-ups, but I often ran into
problems when it came to tasks that were a little outside the typical.
This got frustrating. I'd like to hear from others have experienced,
as well.