I think a lot of people wonder what’s happened to TurboGears.  Where is TG going?  Where has it gone?  In a recent mailing list post, we were blasted for our documentation, or lack there-of.  People seem sort of frustrated that they have a great tool in TG2.0, but have to spend so much time isolating their own technical problems that they fail to see that there is considerable documentation in most areas, but that the docs have a few sore spots here and there.

2008 was all about making TG2 _work_.  We’re past that now.  Most things pretty much work, some things work really well.  Other things need some attention.  Now that we’ve got the hard part of actually  designing a functioning framework, we can focus on documentation, and using that valuable framework we have written to push the envelope of what TG can do.

One of the “things” we need provide to the user community is better documentation.  In the past few weeks I have seen more drive in our community to improve the docs than ever before.  Michael Pedersen has taken over responsibility for our documentation.  I cannot thank him enough for his work, both in reviewing, reorganizing, adding to, and fixing errors in our existing documentation.  His kind of no-sacrifices attitude towards the docs means that we won’t just have “something” up there, we will have what it takes for developers to create web applications using TurboGears.

ToscaWidgets is a sore spot for a lot of folks.  I feel your pain.  Lot’s of folks say you don’t really need TW to do what it does because you are just creating HTML forms, what is so hard about that.  Well, I’ll tell you that I could not have written Sprox without it’s flexibility.  Here’s the good news: TW has been re-written from the ground up by Paul Johnston in the past few months.  I’ve been helping in this process, providing the tests that will make it more stable than the previous version, and making sure the codebase is not so complex a feeble mind like my own cannot comprehend it.  I spent some time benchmarking it, and making sure it’s as fast as it can be.   TW2 is 2x as fast as TW.  It approaches the speed of simpler frameworks that _only_ produce html (they don’t do resource injection, parameter cascading, etc.)

On other fronts, Jorge Vargas and I have been working on integrating MongoDB with Sprox.  This will become the “killer app” for sprox 0.7.  For me, this represents proof of concept for Sprox.  We have successfully integrated the basic workings of MongoDB into Sprox, which means I generalized in the right places enough for this to work.  The result is a TG Admin that will work for MongoDB or for SQLAlchemy equally.

So yeah, there’s still a lot of activity on the TG front, and if you pop into IRC you can feel free to chat up at least one of the TG dev team at almost any hour.  Also, we are having a DocSprint Sept. 25-27 (with a main emphasis on Sept. 26), in Boulder, CO and worldwide remotely.  We will be addressing the over 100 todo items that Michael has so graciously gathered for us.

This is the first part in a 3 part serious on TurboGears.  The next part is entitled: “TG’s Job is hard.  Here’s why.” which will discuss various philosophical challenges with running a project like TurboGears.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Python, Software, Sprox, Turbogears. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.