Pylons 0.8 released

Finally pushed out release 0.8 of Pylons, a bunch of great features bundled up in a slick package that makes web development easy and brings re-use to new levels. I'm not going to repeat the full announcement here, but I'd suggest checking it out if you're the slightest bit interested in a framework leveraging WSGI for re-use and ease of use.

Now that 0.8 is out, its already time to get to work on 0.9 which is going to have a slightly more stream-lined WSGI stack but other than that won't be very different from 0.8 from a usability perspective.

Ian Bicking noted that I was considering building the next Pylons on RhubarbTart which is sort of true. Julian Krause, Ian and myself are working on WSGI and associated components that will find themselves in all of our “frameworks” and most likely quite a few others too. That's really one of the best things about writing solid pieces of web code in a more component style vs. a hulking framework, portability is great and the re-use is fantastic.

So far, Routes has found itself embedded in at least a half-dozen different frameworks and I've heard some rumors its to be ported to PHP for the Zend framework as well. The WebHelpers package is also picking up users and is being used by some Djangonauts which is great as Django is generally a fairly ‘helper' friendly framework.

Ah yes, back to the topic, Pylons has tied together these pieces of code in a very seamless fashion that make it easy to write what you want without forcing you down a path that may confine you later. On the other hand, Pylons currently doesn't have some of the friendlier elements that frameworks like TurboGears and Django both have. Such as a pretty Admin interface, or an extensive Toolbox app, but that stuff is in the works where appropriate.

Our main desire with this release was to get solid footing for the integration of these parts, and a good architecture for building web applications. To that end, we think Pylons is a very solid performer and will adapt easily to a wide variety of needs. You'll also get a framework that makes it a snap to plug-in new middleware whenever something striking your fancy appears on the radar, and you can keep using the parts you like best, even if you stop using Pylons.