When comparing Flask vs ActFramework, the Slant community recommends Flask for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” Flask is ranked 7th while ActFramework is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Flask is:
Flask is very easy to get up and going, with vanilla HTML or with bootstrap pieces. It doesn't take much lines of Python to load Flask to get headers working, etc, and since it's all modular you don't have to have something you don't want in your application.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Minimalist without losing power
Flask is very easy to get up and going, with vanilla HTML or with bootstrap pieces. It doesn't take much lines of Python to load Flask to get headers working, etc, and since it's all modular you don't have to have something you don't want in your application.
Pro Lots of resources available online
Flask is one of the most popular Python web frameworks, if not the most popular one. As such, there's plenty of guides, tutorials, and libraries available for it. A large number of important Python libraries, such as SQLAlchemy have libraries for Flask, which add valuable bindings to make the development process and the integration between these libraries and Flask as easy as possible.
Pro Extremely easy to build a quick prototype
Even though it's pretty minimalistic out of the box, Flask still provides the necessary tools to build a quick prototype for a web app right after a fresh install. With all the main components pretty much packed in the flask
package, building a simple web app in a single Python file is as easy as it gets.
Pro Very flexible
Flask gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they develop their web applications.
For example, the choice of not having an ORM, but instead choosing one suited to the task, or another area where Flask gives a lot of options to developers is the templating. They can use Jinja2, Flask's default templating language or choose from a number of different templating languages they desire.
Pro Great documentation
The official documentation is very thorough and complete. Everything is explained in-depth and followed by extremely well-explained tutorials that tackle real-world problems.
Pro Able to use ORM or "true SQL"
Pro Performance
There are two aspects of performance: how quick a developer can deliver a feature and how fast the app is running on the product server. Act is designed to deliver excellent results in both aspects. With unbeatable developing experience, Act makes it very easy to release a feature; on the other side Act is very fast in runtime. Check out this 3rd party benchmark result.
Pro Hot reload
You never restart while you're working on your Act application. Act's hot reload feature is fast and stable, it makes you feel like dealing with scripting language frameworks like Django or NodeJs. Watch this video and feel it.
Pro Scalability
Act is built as a stateless framework. It supports horizontal scale.
Pro Secure
Act is built as a secure product. It provides built-in CSRF/XSS prevention mechanism. And act-aaa makes it very easy to implement Authentication/Authorization/Auditing in your app.
Pro Superb RESTful support
Act makes creating RESTful service a kids game. It features AdaptiveRecord (allows front end to drive the data structure), JSON response control (just declare the fields you want to present or hide) and RESTful URL routing with path variables.
Pro Easy to deploy
ActFramework is not a servlet framework and there are no requirements on containers/app servers. It has a small package size (a helloworld distribution package size is less than 20 MB), a small memory feet print (a helloworld app heap usage is less than 20MB) and a fast boot up speed (a helloworld app starts in less than 3s).
Pro Templating
Act's view architecture is very flexible and support using multiple view engines in your app. The default template engine is Rythm, a very developer friendly and powerful template engine. Act also support other templating solutions including freemarker, velocity, thymeleaf, and mustache via plugins.
Pro Configuration for multiple environments
Act supports load configuration from a common dir and then overwriting it from a profile dir. Makes it very easy to manage configurations in different environments (e.g., dev, uat, sit, prod) Watch this video to see the innovative way Act delivers its configuration support.
Pro Concise and expressive
Act does not require you to put Annotation when it is able to infer the intention from other parts of the code, i.e., you don't use @PathVariable
or @RequestParam
to tell Act the binding parameter name. And you don't need a ModelMap
to bind variables to render argument names. Act has sophisticated byte class scanner to detect the variable names to do bindings automatically.
Pro Comply to standards
Act's IoC is built on top of Genie, a fast dependency injection library that fully supports JSR330, and Act's validation solution is built on top of JSR303. Act is NOT an odd framework to most Java developers. Unlike Play1.x, ACT applications follow the standard maven project structure and it is very easy to integrate other Java libraries.
Pro Database access
Act's DB layer is extremely easy to use. It supports SQL databases (through ebean orm) and MongoDB (through morphia). Using multiple datasource can never be that easy with Act's DB layer. Go here for more information on this.
Pro Fast and flexible routing
You can configure your routing in either Spring MVC/Jersey style with annotation or Play style with route table or a combination of both. Act's routing supports RESTful URL path variables, optionally validated with regular expressions.
Cons
Con Not async-friendly
Flask is explicitly not designed to handle async programming.
Con Setting up a large project requires some previous knowledge of the framework
Setting up a large project with Flask is not that easy considering how there's no "official" way of doing it. Blueprints are a useful tool in this regard but require some additional reading and are a bit tricky to get right for a beginner.
The lack of some defaults can also be problematic. Having to choose between different libraries for a certain task is never easy, especially if you have never worked with Flask before.
Con Threadlocals and globals used everywhere
The default way of creating applications in flask makes it hard to use reusable and clean code.
Con HTML-oriented, not API-oriented
Not necessarily designed for making APIs, though that is possible
Con Incomplete microservice support
Although Act is built to be a great framework that supports microservice development, it lacks some of the key features at the moment, like sending requests to other microservices from within the app, service governance, and messaging handling.
Con Very small community
As of February 2017, Act is a brand new framework (even though the project started at the end of 2014). Community is still forming.
Con Functional testing support still under development
Developers are still working on innovative functional testing support for Act.
Con Documentation is still being written
Act's documentation is still under development.