Turbogears

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

These last few days I’ve been experimenting with TurboGears, the Python answer to Ruby on Rails. This has been one of those situations where you write something yourself for the learning experience, and then throw it away and use someone else’s tool. TurboGears comprise of a full stack of tools for writing interactive web applications, including:

• database layer
• templating language
• javascript library
• url-python mapping system.

Now in the past, I’ve probably implemented most of the above myself, or pulled together existing systems such as Cheetah, prototype, mod_python with my own rudimentary url-to-python function mapping system. But, as I said, having done it once to get my head around the concepts, it’s much nicer to then take someone’s off-the-shelf system and get on with the job. I like the TurboGears philosophy, which is about taking existing toolkits and making them play nicely together, rather than re-invent the wheel. Apparently it’s also easy to swap in other components, for example replacing the default templating language (kid) with another, such as Cheetah.

Hopefully it will become another useful instrument in my ever-growing toolbox.

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