Best Python Web Frameworks
One of the popular applications of Python is Web development. If you want to be a web developer, then Python, with its wide range of frameworks, proves to be a good choice.
This article will discuss different frameworks, full-stack micro and asynchronous, that Python provides. Let us start with the introduction to frameworks.
Python Web Frameworks
Python Web framework is a collection of packages or modules that allow the development of web applications. These take care of several pre-built functionalities including handling and processing input or managing hardware, etc. Using this, developers need not handle low-level details like protocols, sockets, or process/thread management.
Python web frameworks can manage:
- Interpreting requests (getting parameters, handling cookies, etc.)
- Giving responses (presenting data in formats such as HTML)
- Storing data, etc.
Classification of Frameworks in Python:
These frameworks can be divided into three types, namely:
1. Full-stack frameworks: These are the frameworks used generally to build larger and full-featured web applications. If you want to build something complex quickly with all the default components provided for building an application, full-stack frameworks are a good choice. They provide the facility to communicate with databases, template your views, manage queues, and do other background jobs.
2. Microframeworks: These are generally used to build web applications that include small functionalities. These don’t offer additional functionalities such as database abstraction layer, form validation, and specific tools. Hence, these give the developer much more control over application design and it can result in better performance.
3. Asynchronous frameworks: These are used to give high levels of performance by allowing a very large number of concurrent connections. Generally, these frameworks require more perfection in programming style and have a more limited set of plugins. These are better choices when you need to provide specific functionality to your application at a very high volume.
Now, let’s look at some of the important Python frameworks to help you with Web development.
Python Full Stack Frameworks
1. Django:
Django is a Python full stack framework that is widely used by developers these days. It is an open-source and free framework that provides the facilities to build web apps in less time, and smaller lines of code. It focuses on automation and follows the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle.
Originally developed for content management systems, it gained popularity in web applications. It comes with documentation and community support and contains built-in packages and libraries. This gives many facilities which include templating, automatic database generation, DB access layer, and automatic admin interface generation, URL routing, web server support, ORM mapping to databases, and many more.
Giant companies like Instagram, Pinterest, Disqus, Mozilla, The Washington Times, and Bitbucket use the Django framework.
2. Pyramid:
Pyramid is another popular full-stack framework to build complex web apps with ease.
It provides routing, renderers, and command-line tools for bootstrapping a project, but offers you the ability to choose your database layer, templating system, etc. It helps in URL generation, templating, and asset specifications, quality measurement, security management, comprehensive documentation, and HTML structure generation.
Pyramid has active community support. Its ability to work equally well with small and full-scale applications is one of its advantages. It also gives extensive testing support and offers flexible tools for development.
3. Web2Py:
Web2py is an open-source full stack framework that allows you to develop scalable, secure, and portable web app with ease and in a fast way. It has its web-based IDE, debugger, and deployment controls. One can deploy, debug, test, administer the database, and maintain applications using this framework.
It has huge community support and it is backward compatible. Some of the other features are built-in data protection, modular MVC architecture support, data security, and role-based access control.
4. TurboGears:
TurboGears is a framework that allows the developer to start the application with a single file (like a microframework) and scale it up to a full-stack app. You can create a database-driven, ready-to-extend application in just a few minutes. It has ORM with real multi-database support and inline many full-stack frameworks, it is based on the ObjectDispatch paradigm.
It is highly scalable and also provides integration with the MochiKit JavaScript library. Its default template system for TurboGears is Kajiki which is an XSLT-inspired language.
5. CubicWeb:
CubicWeb is a semantic web application framework in Python. It helps the developers in building web apps by reusing the components called cubes. It follows an object-oriented design for the code more or provides efficiency and easily debuggable properties. Its features include semi-automatic mechanisms, multiple databases, security, workflows, and reusable components.
Python MicroFrameworks
1. Flask:
Flask is a microframework for Python. It has a built-in development server and unit-testing support. Inspired by the Ruby framework Sinatra focuses on pricing features such as requesting handling, routing, WSGI compliance, templating. It also provides interaction with databases, authentication and authorization, security, and so on.
They are very useful to build small, simple apps. And they allow scaling to a large application. Some of the good examples where flask is used are LinkedIn and Pinterest.
2. Bottle:
The bottle is a microframework that allows creating small Web applications in a simple and fast way. It is similar to Flask but has only Python libraries as dependencies. This makes it easy to run in any environment and is also a good choice for small projects.
It provides a built-in HTTP server, WSGI support, plugin support for various databases, adapter support for template engines, and URL parameter support, key/value databases, etc.
3. CherryPy:
It is an old object-oriented HTTP framework used since 2002 and is stable. The difference between the above two frameworks is that it is object oriented and pythonic, that is, the code resembles the general Python code. It is fast, production-ready, HTTP/1.1-compliant, compatible to run on multiple HTTP servers, and can be used with any Python WSGI application. It has built-in plugins for session management, authentication, static content handlers, caching, profiling, etc.
Its web apps are standalone that embeds their multi-threaded web servers. It runs on Android, Python 3.5+, PyPy, and Jython and also supports various web servers like Apache, IIS, etc.
4. Falcon:
It is a microframework used to build web apps that have high performance with app backends, APIs, and microservices. It promotes REST architecture style. This framework is among the fastest web frameworks for Python.
Falcon is a secure and reliable framework. It assists in unit testing using WSGI helpers and also mocks with additional features being the processing of DRY requests by hooks and middleware components. It is used by EMC, Hurricane Electric, OpenStack, Opera Software, Wargaming, etc.
Python Asynchronous Frameworks:
1. Sanic:
Sanic is a flask-like framework, but it is faster than Flask. It is a relatively new framework, it can be thought of as one of the good options in this new generation. It supports asynchronous request handlers and makes code non-blocking.
2. FastAPI:
It is a fast and modern web framework used to build APIs with Python. It is newer than Sanic but is growing fast. This can handle synchronous requests, asynchronous requests, streaming, and WebSockets.
It also has built-in support for authentication and authorization, data validation, JSON serialization, and features automatic API. FastAPI’s documentation and support are very good. Its syntax is similar to Flask, which makes it migrate from Flask to a fully async area.
3. Starlette:
Starlette is a lightweight ASGI web framework and toolkit. It helps to build your application with any degree of control. It is generally used for asyncio services. Various other features include WebSocket support, GraphQL support, in-process background tasks, session and cookie support, CORS, GZip, static files, etc.
4. Tornado:
Tornado is an older async web framework, created before asyncio is included in Python. It includes routing, templating, session and cookie management, native WebSocket support, security features and has a range of options for storing data. Its features lie in between those of full stack and microframeworks.
Tornado is undergoing regular improvements and maintenance, with the help of a robust community. It is a great tool for non-blocking I/O. and can handle tens of thousands of open connections. It is used by Facebook, Quora, etc, in their production architecture.
Conclusion
We saw a lot of frameworks above. One question that would be coming to you is which one of these to choose. If yes, the answer to this question could be that it completely depends on your ease and the need for the application you choose to build.
I hope, this article helped you gain some knowledge on the web frameworks in Python. Happy learning!