Today I tip my hat to Jonathan Ribbens, whose jonpy project is a breath of fresh air for Python web programming.

I found Zope to be overblown, and the likes of Quixote to be too focused on page templating. Jon's work gives me what I need; servlet-style building blocks for crafting my own MVC web applications. He defines a common Request object that encapsulates the request/response data and logic, conveniently presenting query parameters, uploaded files and cookies. Adaptors for the disparate deployment models of FCGI, straight CGI and mod_python present the exact same Request interface to the developer's code. Wonderful.

As if that weren't enough, Jon throws in a web templating solution and an ingenious database connection pooling module.

The appearance of such a necessary and well-executed package in such a low-key form is typical of the no-nonsense Python world, though I can't help thinking that more of a song and dance is warranted in this case.