I haven't been blogging like I should lately. Not for a lack of possible content; but I've been focusing very much on Paste. If I'm not working at the day job, I'm working on Paste, or if neither of those then I'm trying to stay the hell away from the computer. Not always successfully. And I haven't been blogging here in part because it keeps crashing my server, for dumb reasons (but if I don't post then no one reads this, then the server is okay!)

Anyway, Paste is coming together well; we're using it on production applications at work. I just have to resolve all the distribution issues and it should be ready for a release. I continue to believe it has a lot of importance to Python web programming. In part because it solves a problem that isn't unique to Python; we all complain about the multitude of frameworks, but it's actually just the same in the Java and PHP worlds. And maybe it's a little mean to say so, but Ruby isn't enough of a world to have this problem (that is, as the number of Rails programmers quickly comes to overwhelm the number of Ruby programmers, it seems obvious that the multitude of web frameworks won't be a problem for Ruby anytime soon).

But, other people's greenfield work aside, Python's problem isn't unique, and I feel like Paste has real potential to solve this problem in a way that I don't think exists elsewhere. In PHP the control flow is so messed up, they are a long way from being able to bring things together. In Java the control flow allows for the same kinds of abstraction, but the language itself is resistent to decoupled code, and the workarounds are so heavy that the disincentives are considerable. In both cases, I think Python has the potential to support heterogeneous environments in a much more granular way.

At times I worry that Paste will turn into Yet Another Framework, but I think it has maintained non-frameworkness fairly well. Once a framework or application has WSGI support, integrating it into Paste is fairly trivial. And as Paste builds features -- slowly but surely -- these features are all in turn based on WSGI when at all appropriate, and any other frameworks can come along for the ride. Things like the profiler are completely framework-neutral.

Right now the only big barrier I see -- and I'll admit it's a very significant barrier -- is distribution and tracking changes. I haven't made many backward-incompatible changes over time (I just haven't felt a need), but there's no guarantees at this point. And Paste brings in all sorts of dependencies. I'm optimistic that Easy Install will help resolve this, but there's still work to be done. A lot of it is just a matter of figuring out how to use what's already there.

There hasn't been a lot of activity on the Paste list recently. I'm not sure what to make of that. It's summer, people tend to wander off during the summer. I also feel there's lots of lurkers, but still only a small number of people who are seriously interested, and even

those people are hedging their bets. But I'm not sure what to do about this, how to better bring people into the process and encourage a sense of investment.