Python ORMs Supporting POPOs and Substituting Layers in Django

[Travis Parks]

Hello:

A new guy showed up at work a few weeks ago and has started talking
about replacing a 6 month old project, written in ASP.NET MVC, with an
open source solution that can handle massive scaling. I think his
primary concern is the "potential" need for massive web farms in the
future. In order to prevent high licensing costs, I think he wants to
move everything to open source technologies, such as the LAMP stack. I
also don't think he truly understands what ASP.NET MVC is and thinks
it is the older WebForms.

I have been researching open source MVC frameworks and came across
Django. It looks like an awesome tool, but I am willing to look at
others. I have experience in Python (and enough in PHP to want to
avoid it and absolutely none in Ruby) so I think it would be a good
language to develop in.

I was wondering if there were any ORMs for Python that used POPOs
(plain old Python objects). There is a lot of business logic in my
system, and so I want to keep my data objects simple and stupid. I
want the ORM to be responsible for detecting changes to objects after
I send them back to the data layer (rather than during business layer
execution). Additionally, being a stateless environment, tracking
objects' states isn't very useful anyway.

Honestly, I doubt this guy is going to get his wish. The people paying
for the application aren't going to be willing to throw 6 months of
work down the drain. Never the less, I want to have plenty of research
under my belt before being asked what my thoughts are. He was talking
about using the Zend Framework with PHP, but I want to avoid that if
possible. Django seems like one of the best MVC solutions in the
Python arena. I would be willing to replace Django's ORM solution with
something else, especially if it supported POPOs. I could even map all
of the non-POPOs to POPOs if I needed to, I guess.

Finally, I wanted to ask whether anyone has tried having Django call
out to Python 3 routines. I am okay using Python 2.7 in Django, if I
can have the controllers call business logic implemented in Python 3,
accepting POPOs from the data layer. Django would really just be a
coordinator: grab data from Django ORM, convert results into POPOs,
load up Python 3 module with business logic, passing POPOs, returning
POPOs and then converting those to view models. I'm sweating just
thinking about it. My guess is that there would be a severe penalty
for crossing process boundaries... but any insights would be
appreciated.

Thanks,
Travis Parks