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That's why e.g. Flask exists: it gives you the basics, plus light structure and templating and routing and XSS protection and deployment options and whatever else. With no setup and no boilerplate.

It's about as much effort as typing `<?php`.



While that's true (and I do love Flask), PHP comes installed on every discount web host. Deploying a PHP app is as easy as using FTP, deploying a Python app can be -- but doesn't have to be -- complex. I'd say this is the bigger sticking point than the framework.

Obviously Heroku and other PAAS providers are changing the game as far as deployment ease. It should be to see what happens in the next few years on that front.


Deploying a PHP app is as easy as using FTP, deploying a Python app can be -- but doesn't have to be -- complex.

Easy != Simple && Easy != Good

See "Simple Made Easy" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy).


It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Best I can do is encourage more people to write more Python software, so those crappy free hosts are more inclined to support running it.

Until then, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to pay twenty bucks a month for a server to play with. That's less than AT&T wants to charge me for sending a thousand 160-byte messages.


Don't mess with "crappy free hosts" -- just run it on a free Heroku dyno (http://www.heroku.com/pricing). Kenneth (http://kennethreitz.com) shows you can get good performance with Flask on the free dyno (http://flask.pocoo.org/mailinglist/archive/2012/2/22/flask-o...).


That's a fair bit more involved than "FTP files to my web host and they usually just work"


It's actually easier...

  $ git push heroku master


You can't have 'git' and 'easier' on the same phrase

Or maybe you can: Hg is easier than Git

Now, I don't hate git, I love git, but you're seriously overestimating the knowledge of most of the programmers.

Git for lots of people feels like being thrown in a plane cockpit and asked to fly the darn thing.

And this is seriously something Heroku needs to think about. Sure, for now, it's still mostly early adopters.

But I really wouldn't like to tie my production servers to a specific VCS.

Compare this with drag-and-drop of php files to their ftp server.


Sure, well I would hope it's easy to do a one line deploy to any platform and with any language... once you set it up. You left out freezing requirements for pip, setting up cedar, etc. Nothing like that for a simple PHP app.

I don't want to overstate the case; deploying Flask isn't hard, but deploying PHP is stupidly easy.


That is obviously not sufficent. For using PHP I literally have to tell people to open an ftp GUI client and drag+drop a folder, or do something like:

    sftp -r website user@host:
So, what is the full "this is how you use heroku" I can send to a windows user, who knows HTML and wants to just get started with 'hello world'.


See the Heroku Quickstart: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/quickstart

Essentially you sign up for a Heroku account (https://api.heroku.com/signup), and set up the Heroku "toolbelt" (https://toolbelt.heroku.com).

Once that's done, you can run this bash script (https://gist.github.com/2622850) to create and deploy a "hello world" Flask app on Heroku:

  $ heroku login
  $ bash setup.sh helloworld
  $ cd helloworld
  $ git push heroku master
It should return a live Web URL for your app:

  http://strong-stream-5848.herokuapp.com deployed to Heroku
See the Heroku Python tutorial (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python) for details.


Compared to deploying Hello World in PHP, that's a lot of work.


And compared to putting down the window in my car, turning on the AC is a lot of work. Two buttons and a dial compared to just one button.

One is clearly superior to the other though and anyone going near a car should have zero difficulty with either...


I guess that's true, but you know... so what? Can't we worry more about building something cool than about shaving seconds off the one-time setup cost involved with sharing that cool thing with the world?


As a Mercurial user who doesn't feel like learning git just for the sake of deploying toy Python apps, can anyone comment on whether hg-git or the like is a reasonable way of deploying to heroku?


It would add a bit of overhead, but you can certainly have mercurial at the center of your workflow via gh-git, yes.


Of course, this assumes you are using Git in the first place, or are willing to learn it. Most folks already have FTP/ssh down pat, so git is a big jump from just copying files.


There is also Google App Engine, the free tier is fairly generous as well.


"crappy free hosts" ?




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