Slogged through another day of making administrative interfaces today. I just couldn't help building something that looks a heck of a lot like a framework. When you're faced with a dozen or so virutally identical "edit a table of records" user stories you either wind up with a lot of copy-and-paste or you refactor the dratted mess into something that resembles a framework.

Except because you were avoiding using a framework when you started, now you have an ad hoc framework that's not leveraging any of the modeling goodness of PyTable or SQLObject, or whichever ORM you happen to love. You've got ugly lists of field names and field descriptions and "searchable" lists... which just screams for refactoring into descriptors... bah.

Here's the dirty little secret: web frameworks make doing the gruntwork development a hell of a lot easier. Sure, they can get in the way a bit for doing a little slap-dash script or some funky-cool ultra-custom feature, but the best of them can get out of the way for that stuff without leaving you to slog through days of "Oh, and we need an editor for those three tables, oh, and that one, and then we need one for those two tables joined on that field..." when you're done.

That's the basic secret behind the RAD development models, you may have to do a bit of extra work to get the central feature working, but everything else just falls out the back end. You focus on the domain issues and something else worries about the vanilla "how to program a website" stuff.