About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 95839 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

YAPWF: TurboGears

Even if all the recent interest in Django hasn't stopped other people from trying to create Python web frameworks, I think it has raised the bar for what people decide to unleash on the world.

Enter TurboGears.

Though it's billed as a "megaframework," its structure is almost identical to plain ol' frameworks Subway and Fanery: a stack combining SQLObject, CherryPy, and a templating system (in this case, Kid). TurboGears also adds Ajax support via MochiKit.

It's installable via setuptools; even if this means you need to install setuptools first, the net effort required is still less than manually installing TurboGears and its four separate framework components. Dependency management is no small thing when you're combining several pieces that are all evolving rapidly.

In addition to all of the above, TurboGears has some other notably Rails-ish aspects: it's an extraction from a real project; it has demo webcasts and support for unit tests; it has a breezy website that makes using the framework sound like fun.

Also see Bob Ippolito's post and Philip J. Eby's post on the introduction of TurboGears. Bob and Philip are, respectively, the creators of MochiKit and setuptools.

I think the name leaves a lot to be desired, but otherwise TurboGears is looking very good.

Sunday, September 18th, 2005
python + rails + web frameworks