Well, to an extent I've been proven right, and these products have largely been sidelined in favour of a new paradigm. The Ruby programming language is often compared to Python as the feature sets are incredibly similar. So when Ruby On Rails came out, leading Tim O'Reilly to claim that with it, 'Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days', Python users were left scratching their heads, wondering why the Python equivalent didn't exist yet, despite Python being the older language with the wider and more mature user base.
My opinion on the matter is that too many Python developers have traditionally been convinced that Python is a better Java, merely because they seem to have come from a Java background - as perhaps most people do these days - rather than because of any compelling similarity between the languages. So all Python web frameworks have looked much like the overblown Java ones, meaning they miss out on the simplicity that Python can offer.
Obviously Ruby had raised the bar, and then Python developers finally stepped up. As a result, we now have 3 serious contenders:
There is rumour of 2 of the above combining, which could potentially create a de facto web development standard for Python, which has been a long time coming.
Some of the functionality of these systems is built out of the best parts of the previous myriad of competing web systems, but the idea is to make frameworks that are clean and easy to use, yet potentially powerful, just like the language they're written in. Check them out.
