That is a goal of Brubeck too. By using DictShield for modeling you get all your modeling needs, including serializing to Python dictionaries or JSON strings, but it doesn't have an opinion on what database you us.
Your database layer might change, for whatever reason, so you adjust a few queries for loading data and you're back in action.
In addition to this many people haphazardly choose their framework and make the mistake of using Tornado without understanding how nonblocking I/O works. If a user chooses.
Brubeck, they would get nonblocking support for free, which makes it a considerably safer haphazard choice.
I think it's unfortunate that the power of choice isn't as appreciated outside the Python world but I can also relate to people who feel they have to read way too much stuff.
In spite of this, however, Brubeck indeed aims to be a one-stop shop. It uses coroutines + nonblocking I/O to make scaling up easy but it also a web.py style routing system because all of us know this style already.
J2 Labs is the name of my consulting company (and twitter account @j2labs).
Brubeck + DictShield are both projects that have risen from building API's for startups. I aim to make Brubeck as useful as possible for building web projects a quick and easy process, without sacrificing easy scaling.
My thinking here is that a solid model should help developers build their idea fast and make it through the early days of startups without breaking their backs.
I don't particularly like working with Tornado because it offers little support for the plethora of Python drivers that are blocking only. On top of that, the callback model, while powerful, can lead to some seriously confusing code.
I believe people will find the combination of Mongrel2, eventlet and a database agnostic modeling system (DictShield) very flexible.
The difference here is that Brubeck answers ZeroMQ messages from Mongrel2 instead of being a web server. So instead of using WSGI, Brubeck connects to Mongrel2 via a ZeroMQ socket and reads messages representing the web requests.
Beyond that I attempted to create a familiar interface for everyone who's used a pythonic web framework before. Indeed, a lot like Flask, but also like Tornado.
Brubeck is a Mongrel2 handler which makes it effectively a ZeroMQ Framework. But it is built with web serving in mind so I (I wrote it) attempted to also bring many of the customs we're used to with web frameworks to the Python + Mongrel2 world.
There are many python frameworks and each serves a different need. If you are a Tornado user but find the blocking / nonblocking paradigm confusing, you would probably get a lot out of Brubeck because it replaces the IOLoop (like Twisted's reactor) with a simpler system, eventlet.
I'm glad you think it's hip! It's only a couple months old.
Personally, yes. I like to use eventlet in Python partially because of that. Interacting with the scheduler is implicit in eventlet (and gevent, which some prefer) so you write code that looks synchronous.
On top of that, you get nonblocking I/O almost for free, similar to what node attempts to provide, where instead of real nonblocking I/O the system will make blocking I/O look like it's nonblocking. Scala does this too.
But, users of Twisted could also use inLineCallbacks for a similar feel, though it's not required. I'm curious if Node.js could just build the same?