Language Popularity

According to the TIOBE index, the C programming language is back at number one for popularity. This comes as no big surprise as the language has thrived for decades due to it's simplicity. Also, according to the index, Python and Javascript are down. This seems strange since these two languages are huge in the web application space.

Popular Python Frameworks

The Python programming language is great for building web application frameworks. The two main reasons for this are that it is a very simple language to use and understand and it has fantastic networking libraries. Given these two facts, it is no wonder that there exist dozens of relatively solid web application frameworks written in Python.

The more popular web frameworks are the stable ones that have been around for some years. These frameworks have stood the test of time and have a large feature set.

I found another interesting way to look at which frameworks are the popular frameworks by using the Python package index. I browsed the available packages by framework to see which ones have the most packages. The Zope world is still dominating the Python web application framework market. Django is slowly catching up. At the time of this writing, here are the top frameworks listed by number of available packages.

• Plone (880)
• Zope3 (872)
• Zope2 (475)
• Django (295)

This list also demonstrates which frameworks are extensible because the easier it is to extend a software package, the more developers are willing to extend it with other packages and release them. What is surprising is the small number of Twisted and Trac packages. Both frameworks are well written and easily extensible. Having said that, the number of packages listed isn't entirely accurate because not all conceivable framework package lives in the Python package index. Also, there are most likely some categorization errors to take into account.