As a part of its “Made in Chicago” campaign, the Chicago Chapter of ACM is glad to present Professor Massimo Di Pierro with his presentation on the web2py web framework.

web2py was inspired by Ruby on Rails and, as Rails, it focuses on rapid development and follows a Model View Controller design. web2py differs from Rails because it is based on Python (thus it is faster and more scalable), because it provides a comprehensive web-based integrated development environment (thus there is no need to ever type shell commands unless you wish), includes libraries to handle more protocols (for example XML-RPC and RSS feeds), and can run on the Google App Engine.

web2py was also inspired by Django and, as Django, it has the ability to generate forms from database tables and it includes an extensive set of validators. web2py differs from Django because it is more compact, easier to learn and does not have any project-level configuration files.

web2py is less verbose than Java-based frameworks and its syntax is much cleaner than PHP-based frameworks. This makes applications simpler to develop, and easier to read and maintain.

Dr. Massimo Di Pierro is an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing of DePaul University in Chicago and the director of the MS in Computational Finance. Massimo is also the CEO of MetaCryption LLC and the Lead Developer and maintainer of web2py, FermiQCD and a few other open source projects. Massimo is a reviewer for the American Mathematical Society and an Editor of Computing in Science and Engineering (AIP/IEEE). He has given many talks on different topics at conferences and universities, including talks at Chicago Python users group and a tutorial at PyCon2011. He also conducts research in Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics supported by the US Department of Energy. Massimo has a PhD in High Energy Physics from the University of Southampton in UK.