Posted on October 12th, 2005 by Kevin Dangoor

TurboGears is not a Rails clone

Uchi Ogbuji spotted a Slashdot comment by Ian Bicking explaining why TurboGears is not a Rails clone. I don’t think I’ve come out and said it, but what Ian said sums things up quite well. TurboGears is every bit as compelling as Rails, but it’s not a clone. It’s built as an integration of preexisting components, to give you the full front-to-back development stack. We have lots of good tools and ideas to choose from and Rails is not the only idea well from which we’ll be drinking.

Though the parts of TurboGears are not clones of Rails features, David Heinemeier Hansson deserves huge credit for showing what a full stack web application framework could look like at a time when most tools, open source ones in particular, were designed to tackle only one piece of the puzzle.

5 Responses to “TurboGears is not a Rails clone”

John Speno on October 12th, 2005 1:52 pm:

Yeah, everyone knows that TurboGears is a clone of Subway. :-)

And I, for one, welcome our new megaframework overloads.

John Speno on October 12th, 2005 10:31 pm:

I’m sick, so forgive me that I can’t spell “overlords”.

tazzzzz on October 12th, 2005 11:25 pm:

I was pretty sure you meant “overlords”, but overload can happen too :)

phreaki on October 16th, 2005 10:49 pm:

Not a clone, a python way of the framework we should all desire.

I can’t imagine what will come next, hopefully a new component of TG that could help set it apart from rails even further

But it’s python, I can use so many modules that are not even possible with rubyonrails.

I can’t imagine learning ruby just for rails, no way. I don’t even like PHP but it’s damn good enough for what I can do w/it.

I’m about 20 lines of code into what would take me 100 in php.

So I love this clone if you call it that.

Papipo on October 19th, 2005 6:43 pm:

quote [phreaki]: I can’t imagine learning ruby just for rails, no way.

I come from PHP, and i agree that PHP sucks sometimes. But, I’m learning Ruby at the same time as Rails without problem :].