Java Posse Roundup Day 0
I’m here in Crested Butte for an Open Spaces conference, The Java Posse Roundup. The conference officially starts this morning, but we had an “extra session” last night at Bruce’s house. Graham Ullrich presented his experiences with TurboGears and Django, both web application frameworks written in Python.
Graham’s experience with TurboGears was in the summer of last year, with about the 0.9 release. Since then it has been released as 1.0, and I think that the documentation has been improving steadily.
The major drawbacks of TurboGears include:
- Kid templating errors are hard to decipher
- SQLObject is limited in functionality
Both of these can be addressed now, as you can drop Genshi in place of kid (and Genshi has awesome error reporting), and SQLAlchemy is more powerful than SQLObject (and arguably than the ORM built into Django).
The major drawbacks of Django include:
- Incomplete documentation
- Newforms development incomplete
- Not easy to understand what to do with static content
The Django project was poorly advised to put a note in the documentation that new projects should use newforms, since there are major pieces that are not implemented.
Overall, Graham reported that his experience with Django was more “pythonic” than his experience with TurboGears. It’s hard to tell whether that’s because he was using an earlier version or whether it just feels more natural to him. In particular, he likes the admin interface and database mapping.
Here are some more comparisons of the 2 toolkits:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/02/a_brief_djangoturbogears_compa.html
http://www.petersblog.org/node/1083
And, if you missed the presentation and want to read through his slides, he's provided them (see below).
Graham's presentation on Django vs. Turbogears