Here lately I’ve taken to writing a bit more code in Python. It isn’t my first time around in this lovely language, but for the last few months I’ve spent more time in Groovy and Grails, and I felt it was time to revisit the language where whitespace matters. Most of my experience with Python up until this point revolves around scripts and utility code, such as install automation. I had made up my mind to try working on a web project this time, and naturally I started with the one web framework that I had heard most about, and had dabbled with before, Django.

Being a full stack framework similar to Grails, where I have spent a lot of time recently, I figured I would be comfortable here. Truth be told though I am not. Perhaps it is a phase, or maybe I’m just not cut out for full stack web frameworks, but it seems that every time I work in one I end up leaving for a less featured framework. Coldbox, Zend, CakePHP, Grails… all of them are big and have everything you’d ever need, and if they don’t they support plugins for everything else. This is great, but in the end I always seem happier moving to the smaller frameworks. FW/1, Gaelyk (for GAE), and now Bottle for Python.

Bottle is a micro-framework for Python web development. We are talking a single, 128K file that supports URL routes, view templates, JSON serialization, built-in web server for development, and plugins. It’s super light weight and fast, and it doesn’t take a lot of heavy reading to get started. As an example here is a simple view definition.

from bottle import view, route, request
from app.model.core.adampresley.Factory import Factory

@route("/home")
@view("home")
def home():
   viewData = {}
   service = Factory().getVisitorService()

   viewData["numVisits"] = service.getVisitorCount()
   return viewData

The template engine is actually just a light wrapper around Python code itself with basic include ability. Compared to other template engines I’ve used it is pretty utilitarian yet it seems to serve my purposes so far. For example:

<h1>Welcome!</h1>
% if numVisits > 0:
   <p>You are visitor number !</p>
% else:
   <p>No visitors before you! You are the first!</p>
%end

I can honestly say I am enjoying Bottle, and look for more posts on this nifty framework soon. Happy coding!