This is a response to Mark Ramm’s post entitled: “Site Components” in Django and TG2 .

First off I wanted to commend Mark for his insightful post. Mark certainly has considerable perspective on both frameworks, and has a great ability to divulge the best of both. He is often pointing me in directions so that I might make DBSprockets better. One day I even received a link to a Ruby on Rails application, ActiveRecord. He certainly can think outside of the box when it comes to solving the world’s Python Framework dilemmas, and is not afraid to express himself openly about his opinions.

“TG2, like Django will define a set of tools that can be used in building re-usable web site components. TG2 users should be able to powerful, reusable components, with SQLAlchemy, Genshi, ToscaWidgets, and the whole TG2 toolchain. ”

–Mark Ramm

I am so glad that Mark pushed TG2 in this direction. I am glad that he pushed DBSprockets in this direction. This week I
worked on getting DBSprockets to work within a Grok application. With not too much effort I was able to get Genshi, SQLAlchemy, and Toscawidgets working within a Grok environment. DBSprockets followed suit. I was amazed at how little work it was to get Toscawidgets working in Grok despite the complexity with which it interfaces the web framework. Granted, I did have to get Grok working through WSGI, and I have Repoze to thank for that. But in the end, all I had to do was easy_install the correct packages, and modify 4 lines in the .ini file, and poof, Toscawidgets in Zope. Who’d a thought a year ago (before the Pylons/TG “merger”) something like this was possible?

So what is my point? When I started out, I asked Mark for commit writes to TG so that I could build DBSprockets into it. The response was, “Well, no go off and do the google code thing and get back to us.” What a great move that was, because now I am able to support many more frameworks and have a much broader user base. And Django… you’re next.