Making a Wiki with TurboGears (Python) | Hacker News Reader

Making a Wiki with TurboGears (Python)

showmedo.com

7 pointslucks6 comments

The reason why I posted this link is to promote a discussion of python-based web application stacks. We have been using Rails for about a year now, and really enjoyed it from the very start because it did so much for us. Well we have prototyped the idea and would like to start building it for real, and we kept getting caught by Rails when we tried to go against the grain.

So we started to look into other web application frameworks, and turned up a lot of comparison between two python-based frameworks, Django and Turbogears, with Rails. Although they were all very outdated, they all boiled down to using a python-based framework if you want more of the internals exposed (because you have include a lot more code to explicitly specify what you want to do), and use Rails if you don't want these details exposed. To be fair, you can always dive into the rails code itself to look at the internals, so it is more of a question of how you want your application code to look.

As I don't have too much Turbogears experience at this point, I would gladly welcome a re-analysis of the comparison from someone who does. And I hope that just by posting the link to the Turbogears tutorial video that someone realizes there are more webb application frameworks out there besides Rails.

Was there anything that steered you from Django?

I just posted this screencast as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1981

I have not tried Django, but all of the discussions I have read have hinted that the built-in admin interface to Django is awesome, but it seems it is the only real benefit over Turbogears. The consensus was to actually learn both, and use Django when you needed a great admin interface, and Turbogears otherwise. My specific project is more on the otherwise end of things.

Another common theme is that Django is great for projects that don't have user-created content, but instead release a lot of content (I am guessing along the lines of the original Django newspaper app). If you don't have that type of project, people seem to advise using Turbogears.

But I guess the best way is to try both, so I will certainly look at the screencast you posted. Thanks!

We are using Django for our project and it does have user-created content.

I can see why Django is great for publishing content (it as a newspaper app, as you mentioned), but I haven't found anything compelling that puts TurboGears over Django for user contributions. Do you have any specific examples?

The screencast you posted was very nice, and very similar to the Turbogears screencast in spirit. In fact both frameworks look very very similar from the screencasts, with the only differences being URL mapping, the syntax of the methods in the controller, and the templating language. All of those I can adapt to.

What I am really curious about is a few features of Rails that were just stunning and made our life so much easier when making our prototype. They were:

1.) Easy database migrations.

2.) The :AsTree and related specifiers in ActiveRecord that automatically creates utility methods for the object model (such as searching over parents/children of a record)

3.) Easy handling of session data

I haven't found any mention of these features in either Django or TurboGears and I haven't snooped enough yet to find them. If you know if they are there, and how they are done, please let me know!

It looks like there might not be database migrations for Turbogears based on this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2397 . (Note that the post specifically refers to SQLAlchemy, which will be used in future versions of TurboGears.)

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