Thanks for correcting me, I'll get those updated ASAP.

A good rule of thumb: if you show actual code, run it before you post it!

Even for building a mobile backend, having a framework can help. Tools like Cornice (Pyramid), Django REST framework, and Flask-REST can make building API's much easier.

> Pick what your team can be most productive with

Absolutely. If you already know one and like it, go forth and hack. If you're not sure, or don't like the one you have, there are tons of great options. Not just Flask/Django/Pyramid either. Tornado, Bottle, CherryPy, Falcon, and more all have dedicated users (some more than others).

For some things ORM's get in the way, but avoiding them by your own data layer sounds like a pretty big time-suck.

Being able to write a single line of SQLAlchemy to build relationships into your models seems way simpler than implementing relationships in a custom data layer.

I don't deny that it's more work. The question is whether it's worth the investment. I think for large, complex codebases (not little one-off apps) the gains in performance and long-term maintainability are worth it. Having the ability to know the exact performance implications of a query (and not having to waste brain cycles on questions about lazy vs eager loading, etc) is more desirable.

Yeah, I think the sweet spot is using SQLAlchemy's ORM for simple queries and dropping down to core for more advanced usage. Best of both worlds.

Even for advanced queries (ok, not super advanced) SQLAlchemy can hold its own, especially if you're willing to dip into the sqlalchemy.core modules.

It's not targeted specifically for hackathons, but cookiecutter-flask[1] is a skeleton project for the cookiecutter[2] project creator.

[1]: https://github.com/sloria/cookiecutter-flask

[2]: https://github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter

On the cookiecutter project page ([2]) there are links to cookiecutters for a bunch of other frameworks/toolsets.

FWIW it's 4th the list of frameworks in the article, Flask/Django/Pyramid being the top 3.

Yeah, paster is awesome, esp since there's so many great skeletons on PyPi already.