Python frameworks for developing facebook apps

Question

I'd like to ask you about your experiences in developing facebook applications in Python. Which of the popular web frameworks for this language you think best suits this purpose? I know "best" is a very subjective word, so I'm specifically interested in the following:

• Most reusable libraries. For example one might want to automatically create accounts for new logged in facebook users, but at the same time provide an alternative username + password logging functionality. I need authentication to fit into this nicely.
• Facebook applications tend to differ from CMS-like sites. They are action intensive. For more complicated use-cases, usually some kind of caching for the data fetched from Open Graph API is required in order to be able to perform some queries on local and facebook data at once (for example join some tables based on friendship relation).
• I'd definitely prefer popular solutions. They just seem to be much more stable and better thought through. I've previously developed a facebook application in Grails and I as much as I liked the architecture and the general ideas, the amount of bugs and complication that I ran into was just a little bit too much. Also Groovy is still quite an exotic language to develop in, and this time I'm not going to work on my own.

I'm not new to Python, but definitely new to web development in Python. Though after the experience with Grails and all its twists and turns I doubt Python could really scare me.

Answer 1

I would almost undoubtedly go with Django as the easiest and most popular framework for developing any type of web applications, if there's a need for a full-stack framework.

Specifically, in regards to Django's app universe, it is plentiful with many active applications -- but that has its downfalls too. There's no standard application for any 'one' thing, but there are a few applications that will do basically 90% of all that's needed. Sometimes the code is poorly written, but most of the time, the apps work and do what they are needed to do, so there's almost no need for someone to dive right in to the code.

Narrowing down our options, I have had great luck with Omab's Django-Social-Auth, which was absolutely a snap to integrate. It required 3 variables in my settings.py and I was up and running.

The only issue might be if you do not want to use the django.contrib.auth.User model, but, if you are not thinking about using that, I would think about that decision twice :)

To narrow it down even further, pyfacebook is another option for integrating Facebook. It comes with a djangofb application so it's just drop, add to settings.py and all is well. It even comes with an example Django application as part of the distribution. I've had pretty good luck with this application, but, I still think Omab's much easier to integrate.

Finally, Facebook's own python-sdk is easy to integrate from a raw standpoint, where they just give you access to their APIs using a simple Python API. However, it seems to cater more to the AppEngine folks, so YMMV.