Blue Sky On Mars

Amazon may not show it as in stock, but Rapid Web Applications With TurboGears is most certainly out and in print!

Python, TurboGears

Lee McFadden announces Stickum - A TurboGears based Pastebin. There’s nothing quite like the joy of simple but useful apps.

Python, TurboGears

Big event announcement: The TurboGears Jam Hosted by Bruce Eckel. I’m really excited about this, because I’ve heard some great things about how Bruce runs a conference like this. This is akin to the Web Frameworks Jam that Bruce hosted this past July. They had such a good time with TG that they wanted to do more, thus The TurboGears Jam was born.

I’m thankful that Bruce decided to hold this in Ann Arbor. I wouldn’t have been able to make it out to Crested Butte, but I can definitely handle an event that is 3 blocks from my office.

The TurboGears Jam is the kind of event where you really learn things. Rather than having various people preaching  endlessly at you about how to do things, you have an environment where you can try things out and run with them for real.

(This is all my description of the event, based on what I’ve heard of the Web Frameworks Jam. Check out the official page for the full intro.)

Python, TurboGears

At long last, the first half of Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears is now available electronically as part of “Rough Cuts”. You can buy it electronically now and keep getting updates all the way through the final copy of the book. The book is entirely in the editing phase right now and we’re working hard to wrap it all up quickly. We’re expecting the entire book to be on Safari by the end of the month, and it should be available in print next month.

Python, TurboGears

o3: The Open Source Enterprise Data Networking Magazine, a free, polished online magazine available in PDF form now has issue 5 up. Issue 5 has two articles about TurboGears: an introduction that I wrote, and an article about scaling by the guys at FrozenBear (creators of diggdot.us). Check it out! (And pay attention to the ads, if you’ve been thinking about the TurboGears Ultimate DVD.)

Python, TurboGears

Tucked away in this the press release about their participation in Ohio LinuxFest, you’ll find this mention of the new TurboGears AppStack from Spliced Networks:

TurboGears is one of many open source projects that Spliced Networks has packaged into a new solution called AppStacks. Designed to work with any Linux operating system, and Apple’s MacOS X Server, AppStacks are highly secure and optimized server appliance solutions.

Preconfigured, secure server environments seems like a great thing to sell, because there are a lot of components required to get these things right.

Do say hi to John Buswell and crew at Ohio LinuxFest. As I mentioned the other day, Mark Ramm will also be at their booth this weekend, so you can pester him with your TG questions

TurboGears

Nope, the book’s not out yet (though the writing is complete and we’re going through edits now). However, you can find good stuff about TurboGears in print in two places.

I’m tardy reporting on the first one. This is from Japan and I’m not sure if you’d call it a book or a magazine. It doesn’t have ads, but it’s also not as long as a typical book. Whatever you call it, it’s very interesting:

As you can see from the interesting character’s surfboard, this is a “Lightweight Languages” magazine. I wish I could read Japanese, because it looks amazingly interesting, with articles covering 5 different web frameworks that are in use today.

Luckily, I have no trouble reading the second recent appearance of TurboGears in print:

The October 2006 issue of Linux Magazine (at newsstands now) features an article by Mark Ramm which provides another good introduction to TurboGears.

If you’re just getting up to speed about TG or want to read more about it, check these out! Also, be sure to say hi to Mark if you’re at the Ohio LinuxFest this coming weekend. He’ll be at the Spliced Networks booth.

Python, TurboGears

Christopher Lenz announced a new version of Genshi a couple of days ago. Genshi is the template language that was formerly known as Markup. A good way to think about it is that it’s Kid 2.0. The latest version includes a feature I was wishing for in Kid: plaintext templating. Take a look at the doctest for it:

>>> tmpl = TextTemplate('''Dear $name,
...
... We have the following items for you:
... #for item in items
...  * $item
... #end
...
... All the best,
... Foobar''')
>>> print tmpl.generate(name='Joe', items=[1, 2, 3]).render('text')
Dear Joe,

We have the following items for you:
 * 1
 * 2
 * 3

All the best,
Foobar

This uses all of Genshi’s infrastructure, so the kinds of expressions and things that you’re used to when generating HTML and XML will still work here. HTML and XML definitely remain Genshi’s forte and if you’re not generating those formats at all, you’d likely want to choose a different language. (You can get higher performance when you don’t care about document structure…)

Genshi builds on Kid’s template language with flexible includes via xinclude, template matching via XPath expressions, much better error reporting and better performance to boot. The Trac project is currently in the process of converting over to Genshi, and it’s in plan that TurboGears will convert to Genshi in TG 1.1. (You can, of course, use Genshi now with TurboGears, and you’ll certainly be able to continue using Kid.)
Genshi owes a lot to Kid’s original design, but it has definitely moved the state of the art forward a good deal.

Python, TurboGears

TurboGears got its first public display at the first Michigan Python Users Group meeting in September 2005. Last night, at the end of the latest michipug meeting, I flipped the switch to release TurboGears 1.0b1. Here is the announcement email that went out:

I am pleased to announce TurboGears 1.0b1, which now supersedes the 0.8.9 release as the preferred TurboGears release. Many people have been using the TurboGears 0.9x releases for several months now and have been very happy with the results. The 1.0 APIs are stable and we’re focused on bugs and docs for the final 1.0 release. This is a bugfix release over 0.9a9.

What is TurboGears?

TurboGears is a popular rapid web development megaframework, built from a number of great Python projects and with a bunch of high-level features built within the TurboGears project.

TurboGears is a front-to-back framework helping you on the front end (the MochiKit JavaScript library), templates for the view (Kid), the controller in the middle (based on CherryPy) and an object-relational mapper for your database (SQLObject).

To that mix of projects, TG adds:

• Widgets: Python objects that bundle JavaScript, CSS, HTML and server-side validation to make form creation and powerful JavaScript features easy.
• Internationalization: Tools and APIs to help you localize the strings in your application.
• Identity: Authentication and authorization made easy
• Toolbox: a web-based GUI to help you work on your project (write your own as well!) Includes CatWalk to help you work with your database data and Model Designer to help you design your database graphically.
• tg-admin: command line tool that gives you a quick start to your project, helps you set up your database and more!
• Easy Ajax: flexible template support allows you to choose a different template engine (output HTML, JSON, plain text, etc. all from one method)
• Built-in database transactions: keeps your database (and you!) sane. Transactions are committed or rolled back based on the success or failure of your controller code.
• flexibility as needed: though Kid and SQLObject are the standards, we already support many other template engines (Cheetah, Markup, Django) and the powerful SQLAlchemy object-relational mapper.
• community: last but definitely not least — more than 2,000 users on the main mailing list, and others on non-English mailing lists

In short, there are lots of tools to help you get the job done quickly.

What’s New Since 0.8

Nearly everything. All of the projects that TG uses have had significant upgrades, and nearly all of the features that have been built by TurboGears contributors are new.

Website: http://www.turbogears.org/

Download: http://www.turbogears.org/download/

Mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears

Python, TurboGears

If you haven’t already seen it, you should check out the screencast for the online marking tool that Greg Wilson’s group made. Very slick stuff, and I wish the graders had a tool like that when I was in school.

Oprius has posted three new screencasts of their slick Foundations package.

Finally, the good folks of ShowMeDo have pointed me to a page to request TurboGears screencasts. Put in a call for your topic of choice.

Python, TurboGears