Why did you switch to Pylons? Would you now recommend it over web.py? I'm still on a quest to find the best Python framework for myself.

I also switched from web.py to Pylons. Long-term, I think you're better off with it; it's much more mature and won't choke on things like deployment, or internationalization, or multiple database servers.

But if you're new to Python web frameworks, I'd start with web.py and write a few apps with that. It's much simpler to get into, and you'll understand how things work a bit better.

I _also_ switched from web.py to Pylons. One of the biggest reasons was a horrible security gaffe that Aaron made -- he recommended doing sessions by pickling the data and directly storing it in a cookie, which is a perfect candidate for exploitation. If he could recommend that on the web.py mailing list, I don't want to use any other software that he could have made security mistakes in.

Aside from that, Pylons is just a better design. Routes, Mako, and SQLAlchemy are an incredibly powerful toolset, without being overcomplicated.

Well, I like the simple approach to web development that web.py offers and the fact that you get to essentially lay out your own directory structure and pretty much create your own framework. But what really attracted me to Pylons is the interactive web based debugger. If you haven't seen it yet you need to give it a try. In "development" mode it will give you a page with the actual traceback and you can interactive inspect the stack, check the value of variables or just run arbitrary python, all over the web. Makes debugging a lot easier.