Do I really need a web framework?

[waynejwerner at gmail.com]

On Monday, September 30, 2013 2:57:08 PM UTC-5, duf... at gmail.com wrote:
> I want to set up a very simple website, and I need to know if it is necessary to use a web framework (e.g. Django) to do basic interactive operations such as receiving input from the user, looking up a database and returning some data to the user.
> 
> I know that this is exactly the purpose of web frameworks, and that they work fine.
> 
> However, I read somewhere that for small projects such operations can be managed without a web framework, just by using Python with mod_python or with the CGI module. Is this correct? 
> 
> 
> 
> What do you suggest, keeping in mind that I am a newbie and that my website project would be very simple and very small?

If it's small you want, Flask has worked quite well for me. Here's an example:


from flask import Flask, render_template, redirect, request
from <yourstuff> import save_data, get_data
app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def main():
    return render_template('index.html')


@app.route('/data', methods=['GET', 'POST'])
def data():
    if request.method == 'POST':
        save_data(request.form.get('data'))
    else:
        return render_template('data.html', data=get_data())


It doesn't take much to tack SQLAlchemy on top of that for data access, and a couple hundred lines will give you quite a lot of power.

HTH,
W