Tag Archives: Kevin Dangoor

TurboGears 1.0 is released!

TurboGears, which has been at 1.0b1 for a while now, was released as 1.0 today. Here’s a link to an IRC chat that describes what that means, and more about the future of the TurboGears project.

http://irclog.turbogears.org/archive/freenode/turbogears/2007/01/03 (scroll down to timestamp 17:00 for the relevant info).

This is all great timing, since the TurboGears Jam is starting in just a week and a half, here in Ann Arbor. It’s January 14-16 (more details on Bruce Eckel’s site: http://mindview.net/Conferences/TurboGearsJam/).

Here’s Kevin’s mention of the TurboGears Jam from the IRC chat:

Next minor item: I'd just like to remind folks that Bruce Eckel's TurboGears Jam is happening here in Ann Arbor, Michigan in less than two weeks. It should be a lot of fun and I hear that Bruce creates a great learning environment at these kinds of events. I will be at the Jam as much as I can. Also, I'll be introducing TurboGears at CodeMash in Sandusky, Ohio later that same week.

I’m really looking forward to the TurboGears Jam, and I’m excited to see what 1.0 has to offer that I haven’t already seen in 1.0b1. If you haven’t already signed up, I think that there’s still room for a few more people. Join us! Sunday is “introductory day” with pricing that allows you to attend Sunday only (great for those who want exposure to TurboGears, but can’t justify it to their bosses … yet). Monday and Tuesday should give us a lot of time to experiment.

TurboGears Jam

I’m very excited to announce that Bruce Eckel is going to do a TurboGears Jam in Ann Arbor, Michigan from January 14-16, 2007. That’s a Sunday-Tuesday, which gives people who can’t get time off of work to learn a new technology ample opportunity to pursue it on their own. Bruce is offering pricing based on whether you attend just Sunday or Sunday through Tuesday.

My company, SRT Solutions, here in Ann Arbor, is “on the ground” to help coordinate the event, which will be held at the Ann Arbor ITZone (SPARK Central). Bruce will offer us some guidance and his never-ending Python experience and excitement. Kevin Dangoor (creator of TurboGears) and Mark Ramm (author of the emergent Turbo Gears book: Rapid Web Applications in TurboGears) are Ann Arborites who have expressed interest in attending and participating. I sure hope that they can come!

I can’t wait! Hope to see old friends (you know who you are) and meet new friends at this event! Judging from the turnout at the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting last week, where TurboGears was the topic, I’m pretty sure that this is going to be a well-attended event!

AACS Meeting Summary

October 4, 2006

Mark Ramm discussed TurboGears at the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting this week. The crowd was mostly unfamiliar with TurboGears, and most were unaware that it was conjured up and written here in Ann Arbor (well, at least originally … it’s open source, so it’s now getting contributions from all over the world).

Most people know about Ruby on Rails, so he contrasted the frameworks a bit. Basically, Rails is a highly integrated, single piece of software. It uses some naming conventions, and if you follow them, things will just line up and work. But the magic can be a bit disconcerting for some. Features are either provided via Rails, or not available within the framework. That’s the beauty and cost of a single piece of software.

TurboGears doesn’t follow naming conventions. It’s a mega web framework. It combines best of breed tools in Python to support web development. This allows for components to be traded out and replaced with newer, better components, if they become available.

The heart of TurboGears centers around the following components:

SQLObject – an Object Relational Mapper

CherryPy – web server: manages request/response cycle

Kid – templating system, xml-based, guarantees well-formed output

MochiKit (pronounced Mo-chee-kit) – library for Javascript/AJAX, making it easier to write clean javascript

Templates can be made to look really simple by using and extending the master.kid file. Actually, you can have several master.kid files, and use appropriately in different parts of the application.

For deployment, the easiest path is in using CherryPy, proxying with IIS or Apache (using mod_proxy or mod_rewrite). You can also use mod_python, but Mark sees the other options as simpler.

Webfaction has good shared hosting for TurboGears apps. Currently, their control panel only creates 0.8.9 TurboGears apps, but if you ask the webfaction staff will send instructions about installing the newly released 1.0b1 for use with webfaction. They also help to support the TurboGears project.

From a commercial licensing standpoint, there are no hindrances to using TurboGears. It uses the very liberal BSD-style license, which allows you to write applications using TurboGears for commercial use.

Widgets are provided, to reduce work for the developer. Kid produces designer-friendly templates, that can be edited in programs like Dreamweaver without perturbing the python constructs (since Dreamweaver ignores them), but allowing the designer to see placeholders when testing layout without running a web server.

A question from the audience asked Mark to compare with ASP.NET. Basically, he said that you can do anything in ASP.Net that you can do in TurboGears but that you will have to write more code in ASP.NET. Maybe we will see some head-to-head comparisons at CodeMash in January.

Future Directions in TurboGears:

1.SQLAlchemy will replace SQLObject as the default object relational mapper in the future. It does everything that SQLObject does, and more. Needs a bit more work to simplify the definition to match that of SQLObject
2.Genshi will replace Kid as the default templating system. It uses pretty much the same syntax but is about 40% faster.

Documentation options:

1.Mark’s book (Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears) is going to be published in November. Half of the book is now available, on Safari Rough Cuts.
2.The latest issue of Linux Magazine has an article on TurboGears, written by Mark Ramm. It doesn’t appear that it’s available online. Here’s a summary of that article: http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2006/09/22/turbogears-in-linux-magazine/
3.TurboGears DVD contains screencasts and can be purchased on the TurboGears website.
4.Docs are available on the TurboGears website.

Examples of high traffic sites that run TurboGears:

www.diggdot.us: Combines Digg, slashdot, and de.licio.us into a unified format

www.rpath.com : Linux software appliance company

Next month at AACS: Scott Collins, from the Mozilla project, talking about the design and application of programming languages.