IMO, Django had great documentation in it's time (i.e. the django book), which is why it's so popular; but the competitors have caught up, and people are questioning how good Django really is. The main advantages of Django are - lots of libraries, and the generic views. But I personally dislike generic views. They just feel a little like magic, and a little over-engineered. They might be good for larger projects, but using them from the start feels like premature overengineering.
I like Tornado. In the overview (http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation/overview.html), it gives you - auth (using OpenID), secure cookies, XSRF protection, templates, localization, UI modules (really basic, compared to generic views), running in prodution with Nginx, and aync programming. It doesn't have much database stuff (just a wrapper around MySQL), but you can use SQLAlchemy, or some other ORM.
Only the auth stuff feels over-engineered, because it uses async programming to call a general interface for Facebook OAuth, OpenID, Twitter OAuth, and so it's a bit of a dog's breakfast.
> IMO, Django had great documentation in it's time (i.e. the django book)
The "great documentation" is not and has never been the django book. It's the official documentation on the website.
> but the competitors have caught up
Uh... no it has not. Even in the Python sphere, where Sphinx and Django have led to drastic improvements in documentary quality. One of the few projects which could lay claim to that would be Pocoo's/Armin's (Flask, Werkzeug, Jinja) and in my experience the API still feels much more like APIDoc than the craft I feel when I read Django's docs.
As to Rails, it's still a joke. The first documentation link on the rails website is this: http://api.rubyonrails.org/
> But I personally dislike generic views. They just feel a little like magic, and a little over-engineered. They might be good for larger projects, but using them from the start feels like premature overengineering.
That sounds very strange, especially for the older non-class-based generic views: they provide very simple behavior and usually end up replaced over time as it's not possible to customize them sufficiently (a major reason why class-based generic views were introduced).
I have to say I'm not sold on the class-based generic views, they feel far more complex than the old ones (because they are) and the documentation does not help and does not remove that feeling of complexity.
I like Tornado. In the overview (http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation/overview.html), it gives you - auth (using OpenID), secure cookies, XSRF protection, templates, localization, UI modules (really basic, compared to generic views), running in prodution with Nginx, and aync programming. It doesn't have much database stuff (just a wrapper around MySQL), but you can use SQLAlchemy, or some other ORM.
Only the auth stuff feels over-engineered, because it uses async programming to call a general interface for Facebook OAuth, OpenID, Twitter OAuth, and so it's a bit of a dog's breakfast.