TurboGears progress, or, bring on the CRUD

November 06, 2005

A while back I posted a link-festooned introduction to TurboGears. In the last six weeks, there’s been evidence of a lot of progress; because TurboGears makes excellent use of already existing projects, it also benefits from the developer momentum in those projects.

Recently it looks like there’s been a special focus on adding CRUD (create, read, update, delete) functionality. At this point it’s pretty well known that this is a core strength of Django, and I think Django’s admin tools will probably remain the gold standard for a long time. As the TurboGears community ponders CRUD options, I wonder if the idea of adapting Django’s admin itself will come up. (Django is a BSD-licensed project, so there’s no licensing obstacle.) I don’t know enough about the differences between Django’s ORM and SQLObject to say whether this idea is feasible.

TurboGears, with its Rails-like emphasis on web applications rather than “content management,” may end up eschewing a full-blown admin suite. But having started work on my first production Django app (more on that soon) I know that anyone who experiences the Django admin tools is going to measure all others against them, so if TurboGears starts down this path I’m very curious to see where they end up.

Ian Bicking commented on Mon Nov 7 01:14:52 2005:

I don’t think the Django admin is very well documented or made public in a way that would facilitate this kind of reappropriation (though I’ve never specifically looked). Certainly it’s a good API and interface to look at, and take inspiration from, but I think the implementation is all about details, so the implementation itself wouldn’t benefit from adopting Django’s code.

Lior Gradstein commented on Mon Nov 7 04:10:48 2005:

What about Catwalk? I think it’s only in SVN for now. It’s like Django admin, even better, and easy to install.

Paul commented on Mon Nov 7 11:38:10 2005:

Ah, yes. In fact, it was noticing Catwalk that got me thinking about this in the first place, and then I completely forgot to mention it in the post! I can’t comment on Catwalk from a user perspective, but it looks good, and I think it’s smart of Kevin to have embraced it.

Ian, you’re probably right that Django’s influence here may be limited to inspiration. I do hope that extends to neat but currently somewhat obscure features like the live documentation.