TurboGears

Sigh. It's been a long time since my last post.

Anyway, I've just discovered TurboGears. Looks like a really nice Web development framework - they even have a movie, just like Rails :-) Actually, the site calls it a "megaframework", the idea being that it isn't just another framework, but it's actually a combination of existing frameworks.

The demo (build a Wiki in 20 minutes) is really neat. Things I especially like:

• It uses CherryPy, which is probably my current favourite web framework for Python.
• AJAX support built in (via MochiKit)

The database support uses SQLObject, which is pretty cool, although it doesn't support Oracle, which is a shame from my POV. There are ongoing suggestions that Oracle support could be added to SQLObject, though - it seems to be mainly lack of Oracle experience from the current developers, and lack of Oracle experts offering help, that are holding this up. Of course, I could offer help, but I doubt that I'd actually be able to devote the necessary time...

The easy_install setup looks seriously neat. However, I'm still nervous about how it will work alongside my existing Python installation, which has CherryPy and SQLObject already installed as traditional bdist_wininst installers. But I've muttered enough about that on the distutils-sig, and I don't want to be a pain about it. Let's just say that setuptools hasn't really addressed integration with platform package management yet. But I do think that setuptools is the way to go, and now that I have TurboGears as a basis, maybe I can offer some actual help at last (I'm a package user, not a package builder, so I'm stuck until packages start being published which use setuptools).

Definitely one for my "must investigate" list.