Introducing TurboGears 2
by Seth on Jun.09, 2009, under Python, Web Development
I’m the type of person who is a bit anal about trying to use what I think is “the right tool for the job.” This is something I think my Dad passed down to me (I can’t tell you how many times I was scolded with that phrase as a kid—usually having something to do with me trying to hammer an object with anything but a hammer); and it influences my world of development heavily. Because of this, I often find myself using a number of different programming languages and technologies at any given time for various projects. A shell script is perfect when you need something quick & dirty. PHP makes adding logic to HTML a piece of cake. And then there’s my new personal favorite: Python.
Ok, let me back up before I get ahead of myself…
I’ve been a web developer for over 10 years now. When it comes to web programming languages and platforms, I’ve been around the block a bit: Back in the 90s I was building shopping carts from scratch using Perl (ouch!). From Perl, I eventually migrated to PHP which usually made things much easier. From time to time I would play around with Rails; but I never could stomach Ruby’s syntax (I think it reminded me too much of Perl). Even though I never felt like I really “clicked” with PHP, I eventually settled into a few PHP frameworks I liked and finally called myself a PHP developer.
Then one day I stumbled across Python, and it was love at first sight. I quickly vowed that I would soon be doing 99% of my web development in my newfound favorite language, but was disappointed to discover that (at that time) the available web frameworks were either ugly or poorly documented/supported. Reluctantly I returned to PHP, unable to justify moving away from the “quick & simple” nature of what I was used to with PHP and the frameworks I was used to.
I’m not one to give up easily though, and on a recent “re-visit” of the Python web framework scene I was excited to see that things had changed dramatically: Django’s community had exploded and its documentation looked rock-solid. Pylons had cropped up as a serious WSGI-based contender (and modeling quite a bit of it’s functionality after Rails). But what really caught my attention was the (at the time) upcoming TurboGears v2.0 release.
What made TG2 stand out to me was its attempt to build a “best-of-breed” module-set on top of Pylons. Mark Ramm (the current leader of TG development) has been quoted as comparing TG2 to Ubuntu in that “TG 2 is to Pylons as Ubuntu is to Debian.” The sound of that intrigued me, and I started playing around with the TG 2 Betas (and liking what I was seeing!).
Recently one of my clients asked me to whip up a medium-sized project with various amounts of CRUD and Ajax. Ironically, that very same day TurboGears’ v2.0 release went gold. Seeing this as my opportunity to finally begin transitioning into the Python world with a stable “next-generation” Python web-development framework, I have decided to implement my latest project using TurboGears 2. Could this be the beginning of the rest of my life?
I will keep you posted on my progress and what I encounter along the way (good, bad, and ugly). Keep it here for what will likely be an interesting adventure.
Related links of interest:
