Blue Sky On Mars

Matthew Russell has just posted an article at O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter What Is TurboGears (Hint: Python-Based Framework for Rapid Web Development). He and I spoke a few days ago, and he wrote quite an article around the interview. Thanks, Matthew!

I’ve been really busy these past few days, working on features for TurboGears 0.9 and creating a new screencast. This morning a took a quick look at the stats. The TurboGears google group has passed 600 members and the “20 Minute Wiki” is likely to pass 30,000 views this week. It’s also likely that TurboGears.org will serve its 40,000th Python Egg this week!

Haven’t had a chance to check out Ronald Jaramillo’s great CatWalk tool for TurboGears? Take a look at the new TurboTunes tutorial and screencast to see how easy it is to populate your development databases using the CatWalk model browser. This is the first preview of TurboGears 0.9, which is coming soon.

Anyone complaining about BK’s behemoth breakfast sandwich should take a look at the $47 30,000-ish calorie sandwich that’s making the rounds.

Oracle has introduced a free version of their database called Oracle 10g Express Edition (XE). One interesting thing about this release is that Oracle has explicitly stated that people can redistribute this database. The database has built in limitations designed to keep it targeted at only lowish-end apps, so it shouldn’t cannibalize the sales of their full-blown system. Contrast this with Java, which is free but annoys everyone to no end because you can’t distribute it.

Personally, I can’t imagine using Oracle for the kinds of things for which they’re targeting XE. MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird all deal pretty nicely with the low end. Oracle even mentions using XE as an embedded database! I wonder what kind of footprint that would have. Certainly much larger than sqlite and probably much larger than Firebird as well.

via Ned Batchelder

If you’re going to be in Bangalore at the end of November, be sure to check out Swaroop’s TurboGears talk at FOSS.IN/2005: India’s Premier FOSS Event.

Jonathan LaCour has written a nice (and concise!) howto on running TurboGears behind lighthttpd with SCGI. Very handy stuff!