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I'm new to web-application development, and I've just started building a (relatively large) webapp. Thus-far I've been using Django, however, I've just read about Pyramid, and I really like the sound of it: Its documentation reads well, it seems to scale easily from small-to-large projects, it boasts great performance, and it's developers seem quite onto-it. All good things. It also seems quite flexible, which suits my needs well. However, I'm worried about Pyramid's user-base.

For instance, on stackoverflow, the "pyramid" tag has seen 6 questions this week, whereas the "django" tag has seen 247. I know that Pyramid developers are committed to answering any questions developer's have, however, that doesn't completely put my mind at ease. I'm just not sure if I'll be running risks by choosing a framework which has such a drastically smaller community. My fears are this:

  • Not much "user" documentation
    • With Django, you can google how to do pretty much anything you want and you'll end up with a tutorial on somebody's blog somewhere in the world.
    • My fear is that even though the Pyramid documentation seems quite comprehensive, the moment you end up in territory not covered by the documentation, you're kind of on your own (until you submit a question and receive a response, which seems like a much more lengthy process than just reading a blog).
  • What if it disappears?
    • Django isn't going anywhere. I don't know enough about Pyramid to make the same assumption. What if I spend a year developing and maintaining this application, only to find out that in the meantime Pyramid support has died out, merged into a different project, etc.?
  • Hiring future developers for my app - most likely they will know Django, not Pyramid.
    • Maybe this won't be a huge issue if Pyramid has a relatively small learning curve for people who already know Django?
  • There might be other serious draw-backs that I'm not aware of for using a framework with such a young community.

Anyway, I'd love if an experienced developer could give me some feedback about all of this. How much of a risk would I be taking by choosing Pyramid over Django? and more generally, by choosing a newer technology over an older one?

Sky
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    Could the community please consider re-opening this question? I've changed the title to reflect stackoverflow's QA format. I'm asking for concrete information from experienced developers. It's not a matter of debate, it's a matter of understanding the positive and negative aspects of using a relatively new service. – Sky Sep 14 '11 at 03:42
  • I do suspect that the Python community has the maturity to generate several useful answers to a question like this, but I do see why the moderators would fear trolling. We will see what they do. – Brandon Rhodes Sep 14 '11 at 03:45
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    Unfortunately the question still contains too much scope for open ended discussion, opinion and speculation. – Kev Sep 15 '11 at 23:01
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    For the record, I'd consider lurking in the #pyramid channel on irc.freenode.net to get some sense of how quickly questions get answered. – Chris McDonough Sep 20 '11 at 00:41
  • I'm going to be biased but the pylons/pyramid has a great community. Even if you have a huge userbase, it's pointless to read 10 000 blogs that do the same things. I've reached some obscure corner with rails and got my first tumbleweed on StackOverflow. – Loïc Faure-Lacroix Jul 05 '12 at 11:30
  • Have you considered asking on Programmers? – tshepang Feb 11 '13 at 00:08

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