Kevin Dangoor has updated the 20 Minute TurboGears Wiki screencast. He says the original had over 68,000 views!

Bob Ippolito has his Intro to MochiKit presentation slides online. MochiKit is a Javascript/AJAX library that is part of the TurboGears stack.

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, filled with the usual onslaught of jokes/trickery on the web (e.g. the pink Slashdot). But the TurboGears devs had me laughing with this one:

TurboBOB, the “best-of-breed” extension to TurboGears, provides a powerful, robust new feature for TurboGears that targets a need of 80% of enterprise web applications. TurboBOB brings Web 2.0 to that need and ushers in a whole new era of flexibility.

You have to watch the short video that introduces TurboBOB. Heh!

The TurboGears team appears to be applying the “release early, release often” philosphy, and it looks like they are making progress on the road to a 0.9 release, but it’s not quite beta just yet.

Quoth Kevin:

We’ve had a whole raftload of feedback and contributions since the release of 0.9a1. 0.9 is becoming considerably more solid, but I’m not going to upgrade it to “beta” until there are more docs.

If you want to join the fun, check out the changelog and upgrade instructions.

Which, reminds me. Last night I upgraded my TurboGears install to 0.8.9 using the easy_install utility. It couldn’t have been any easier. Color me impressed.

Update: Next up… 0.9a3.

Fast Track is a TurboGears web application for project status tracking. It was developed by Optio Software and is being actively used in-house. Here’s how they describe it:

Fast Track was designed to eliminate massive status reports that had to be completed weekly by developers, then condensed by project managers, and eventually delivered to senior management. As an alternative, Fast Track provides a “dashboard” view showing the current status of all projects, and allows you to drill-down into greater detail about project status, using progress notes, questions & answers, risks, issues, and uploaded files.

The screenshots make it look really nice (dashboard, project view).

Could this be a Basecamp killer?

Via: Kevin Dangoor at Blue Sky on Mars

Update: Apparently Fast Track requires TurboGears 0.9 (currently in alpha). Upgrading TurboGears only gets me to 0.8.9, unless I go to the special Preview Site. Nothing like basing your app on alpha software. Pffft. Also, the install docs are all but non-existant. I know there isn’t “really an official release at this point,” but I was really looking forward to checking this one out. And they aren’t making it easy for me.

Neil Jensen spent some time evaluating web frameworks for an upcoming project he will be working on. He considered Django and TurboGears, but both seemed like overkill for his project. So it looks like he will be going with Pylons instead:

Eventually I wandered across pylons, a lightweight python web framework. The project focuses on providing the bare necessities for quickly creating WSGI-compliant applications and fits my particular application better. Ben Bangert provides a great overview of the ingredients behind pylons, as well as good introduction to WSGI.

When I first heard about Pylons, I thought it was just another web framework. But it seems to be generating quite a bit of buzz, and the people who have tried it seem quite happy with it. Definitely one to keep an eye on!

Back in February I mentioned a new framework called RhubarbTart. Ian has some thoughts related to it, including the source of the odd name.

Quoth Ian:

So, what if CherryPy is simplified in version 3? I’m not sure if they will be simplified towards what RhubarbTart is doing or not; in particular, there is a strong tendency to make traversal hooks instead of making traversal easy to reapply. If CP 3 does become like RhubarbTart, I’m not sure what the point of the distinction will be.

It is also interesting that Ben Bangert is supposedly looking at whether Pylons can be built on RhubarbTart as well.

I remember reading that Subway was going to merge with TurboGears, but according to the main site, the whole project has been indefinitely terminated:

Due to a couple certain copycat frameworks and a lack of the spirit of contribution and collaboration in the open-source Python web framework development community, I’ve decided to stop working on Subway. Feel free to use it, or pick up the project and continue working with it. I still feel it was going to be the best Python web development framework.

I guess it’s time to remove it from the megaframeworks concept map.

Update: Eric admonishes me, “Never begin a blog entry with ‘Subway is dead.’ I read that far, and began panicking, not sure where I’d be eating lunch.” Heh.

Matt Harrison says that this screencast should have been one of presentations at Pycon 2006.

Quoth Matt:

It does a relatively decent job comparing and constrasting J2EE, ROR, Zope, TG, and Django. I talked to a handful of people at Pycon who said they would’ve enjoyed a panel discussion with the web framework creators discussing pros/cons and future areas for collaboration.

It’s 400MB, so I guess I should start downloading that now.

Mark Ramm has uploaded the latest TurboGears 0.9 Alpha Quick Reference Guide. Everything you need to know about TurboGears in one handy page. Looks nice.