[kforge-dev] turbogears framework for web RAD

Thu Oct 6 13:27:23 UTC 2005

Have now checked out turbogears (http://www.turbogears.com). This is 
another python web RAD released in mid-sept but not yet 1.0 (what is it 
right now: new full-stack python web frameworks seem to arrive every 2 
mins). Turbogears attempts to glue together existing python projects 
rather than provide the full stack itself. It uses:

     * MochiKit is a clean and powerful JavaScript library
     * Kid is a designer- and programmer-friendly template system
     * CherryPy makes doing web input/output as easy as writing a Python 
function!
     * SQLObject lets you access your database as you would normal 
Python classes, without obscuring the database itself.

You can read a fairly basic evaluation at:

   http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7912

One question this raises is: should we switch from django to turbogears 
(or at least investigate this)?

Currently we have invested in using django 
(http://www.djangoproject.com) but so far not that heavily -- ie. it has 
been used for templating and some of the form validation but nothing 
much else (John: correct if i am wrong here).

turbogears main advantage over django seem to be:

   1. It uses existing components rather than creating its own (e.g. 
sqlobject)
   2. Associated with this is that the stack is broken up and we can use 
different pieces that we want. Given that we have a pretty hefty domain 
model that we want to keep but be able to wrap a web-framework round 
this is useful.

However we'll need to do some proper investigation on this before 
jumping either way (first thing is coding up a small turbogears app to 
see what happens).

Regards,

Rufus