It’s been a while since I have blogged for a few reasons. One, I took a vacation. No work, open source or otherwise for 11 days. I barely even checked my email. One thing that is great about living in Colorado: I don’t have to go anywhere on vacation, and my family will come to me! I took my sister up the First Flatiron, my dad fishing in Cheeseman Canyon, and all of us took a nice stroll through Chautauqua Park. We ate out almost every night and enjoyed catching up since I have moved 2000 miles away.
Previous to that, I managed to win a skirmish in the framework war at work, and spent an obscene amount of time (on and off the clock) bringing my first production-level TG2 site. This was a really fun project because my coworker and I were given the reigns and let loose on implementation. In 3 hours we had a working TG2 site with data in an EXT grid, with database schema expressed as a tree. In 3 weeks we had a complete reporting system (using EXT) with object-based security. We were also able to implement a file upload manager, and a select shuttle (for assigning groups to secure objects) thanks to the help of Sanjiv Singh, my GSoC protege. Thanks to all of you who have helped myself, and TG2 get off the ground.
One of the reasons I was so absent from the OSS community was that I was trying to wrap my head around what was going on with the EXT licensing, which changed under my feet as I was developing our in house app. The move from LGPL to GPL/Commercial was a shock to the community, and in my opinion based primarily on one person’s greed. My personal choice is to finish up whatever EXT support I have to do for our in-house application, and never look back at it again. I will be moving on to Dojo, and have advised my GSoC students and other people involved with TurboGears to do the same.
Now that I am back from vacation/new project hell, I have been able to release a new module for TurboGears, tg.ext.silverplate, which is a plugin for TG2 providing User Management and Profile pages which are customizable. This all fits under the TGTools domain, which has become a home for tg.ext.repoze.who (Authentication for TG2) and tg.ext.geo (An upcoming library for Geographical support in TG2). If you get a chance, you might want to check out the new TGTools googlecode site.
I also did a new release of tg.ext.repoze.who, which provides authentication/authorization to TG2. The only functionality I as able to contribute was a change to the name-spacing, as well as a full test of it’s functionality. Right now I am working on an LDAP bridge which will allow your TG2 site to authenticate against LDAP, and then dump you into the TurboGears Domain for all of the authorization stuff (groups, permissions, etc.) I should have this completed in a few days. Most of the work for tg.ext.repoze.who was done at the last world-wide WSGI-Turbogears sprint. It looks like TG is going to do a release in a few days.
This weekend I am headed to ABQ for some sprinting with clearwired on their next-generation web application. I am hoping this time around TG2 is mature enough in their eyes to take advantage of everything it has to offer, since they have currently chosen to work simply with Pylons as a framework. Either way, I will be working with some of the best people in the business, and we should be able to push TG foreward one way or another.