Over the past year, a growing number of “next generation Web frameworks” have cropped up, promising to make you more productive, make your code more maintainable, and make your project more fun. And in nearly all of the cases, the frameworks deliver on the pledges, eliminating the drudgery, complexity, and laboriousness of developing Web applications. Famously, Ruby has Rails, and Perl has Catalyst. Now, Python has TurboGears (http://turbogears.org/). Buckle up! It’s gonna be an exciting ride.
Undoubtedly, the question on your mind is, “What makes TurboGears special?” After all, there are a lot of great frameworks to choose from. For example, Ruby has Rails.
Rails deserves a lot of credit for moving Web development forward. Rails offers a well-integrated stack of libraries to handle everything from object-relational mapping (ORM) to HTML templates, and its philosophy of “convention over configuration” highlights how truly monstrous a Struts XML configuration really is. Equally important, Rails includes built-in support for the Model-View-Controller paradigm, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. You can jump on Rails and roll.
But TurboGears offers many of the same innovations as Rails, and goes further. For instance, TurboGears includes SQLAlchemy, the best ORM in any dynamic scripting language. And, of course, TurboGears is written in Python, so Unicode support comes free, and Python’s vast array of libraries is at your disposal. Better yet, TurboGears isn’t a monolithic project.
Rails is a single project…
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