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by jnbiche 5203 days ago
I actually moved from web2py to Flask and Flask-SQLAlchemy as my framework of choice because of the limitations imposed by the web2py DAL (try modeling a school, for example, with the relationships between teachers, students, parents, and classes. It's very difficult in practice on the DAL).

The rest of the web2py framework is excellent, and support is very good. I wish Massimo had spent some of the time he spent adapting web2py to other frameworks on adapting web2py to SQLAlchemy instead. I'd be back in a second.

4 comments

> The rest of the web2py framework is excellent, and support is very good.

Which parts? IMO, the web2py framework is not excellent.

It sounds like you hit some limitations with the DAL and switched away, but those type of limitations are peppered throughout the framework.

Web2py is not well designed, not standard python (look at the source), and it tricks newbies into bad practices.

Sounds like FUD. Care to share some examples? Note, in most cases, the DAL has fewer, not more limitations than a typical ORM. web2py does use standard Python. What bad practices? Have you seen this: http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/24605/infoworlds-2012-tec...?
> try modeling a school, for example, with the relationships between teachers, students, parents, and classes.

The DAL can be used to model any set of tables and relationships that can be created in an RDBMS, so it's not clear what the problem would be modeling the relationships among these entities. Should be fairly straightforward.

It would be interesting to see how you tried it in the DAL and the alternative that you found easier in SQLAlchemy. Can you show an example?
Thanks for asking politely (I mean that truly). I'm on deadline now but I'll post back here in a day or two with the problems I ran into.
Great. Thanks.
Point me to one SQLAlchemy example that you think has no web2py DAL equivalent and I will try show you otherwise.