By the end of today, I feel quite confident that TurboGears holds great potential as a productive web application framework. We went through all of the 20-Minute Wiki and TurboTunes tutorials. It would take a full-blown article to cover the stuff I’ve seen, but for now, I will just highlight some of the features that surprised me.
Despite the youth of the TurboGears project, they seem to have already realized the important of a useful toolset. With a simple command-line tg-admin toolbox from the root of my TurboTunes tutorial workspace, I found an impressive little bundle of tools there at my disposal:
What’s CatWalk? A web application to browse my domain model? No way, you must be kidding! Nope:
Lo and behold, my domain model, with one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, browsable and editable right there. Wow. I had also noticed a Model Designer, and set my expectations to what I thought was an appropriate “lowness”. Not necessary:
That is the sample model for the domain I had manually created, represented in diagram form. I have yet to see any tools like this for Rails, though they may exist. The “pythonic” nature of the MVC components of a TurboGears application has an aesthetic that totally appeals to me. I also noticed that unit testing code is stubbed out and ready to be run using Nose. Looking forward to learning more about that.