June 22nd, 2009 by Florent Aide
Since the beginning (nearly) of TurboGears 2.x development we use a private index to store all our dependencies and point people to it for installation. This was nice because it helped us control our dependency tree and make sure installation of our unstable software was as easy as possible.
Since we had released a stable 2.0 version, followed by a 2.0.1 bugfix, we really were lacking a real pypi install mechanism. This is now a thing of the past! You can install a full blown TurboGears2 environment in one simple command:
easy_install tg.devtools
and this will fetch everything using normal lookups from the pypi. I hope this will help people out there.
At the same time I’d like to ask for help in that domain: If you are using TurboGears2 and find out that some dependency that needs compilation is not found in a compiled state (either on pypi or on our index), please help us:
- By sending a compiled version of the egg to me (florent aide, you’ll find me on the mailing list easily)
- By pointing us the missing dependency (send a mail in the turbogears or turbogears-trunk mailing list)
- Or even better: try to become a maintainer for the specific dependency, that you know will always be missing for your architecture, and let us know about that great news. The whole open source community will become better, your karma (the real one, not the one you can admire on ohloh) will bump-up and you’ll be forever remembered on endor.
Now this leaves us with one more thing to do: finish the web site for turbogears that is currently in a poor state. If you would like to help us on the engine, please let us know in the mailing lists or via private message. If you want to help-out with content, please let us know also and we’ll be more than glad to give you an editor account and some directions to get some content online in this new website.
Cheers all,
Florent.
June 15th, 2009 by Florent Aide
In the last post I said we presented TurboGears 2.0 at the Pycon FR event. We have received the video feeds from the organization. This is a French presentation, sorry for the non-french speakers.
As a reminder the code of application we presented is available on bitbucket.
June 12th, 2009 by Florent Aide
Two weeks ago we (Jonathan Schemoul, Thomas Zaffran and me) animated a TurboGears 2.0 presentation (in french) and workshop at PyconFR 2009. PyconFR is an annual French Python event organized by the AFPY.
The presention was separated in two phases. The first part covered an history of the project and a technical overview. The second part was a live coding session during which we created a small todolist application to show-off the new TurboGears 2.0 features.
At the end of this presentation, one of the attendees came to us and gave us a nice remark that I would like to share with you here: “I did not remark any changes in TG2 since my TG1 days, did you change something?”
This was a pleasant surprise to me. This means one thing: we changed the whole underlying layers, rewrote authentication and authorization, switched tgwidgets with ToscaWidgets, based our Framework on Pylons instead of CherryPy — and yet this person, looking at the controller’s code of our todolist application felt “at home like if it was a TurboGears 1.0 application”.
As we already stated, we want to ease-out the tg1–>tg2 transitions as much as possible. We know there is some room for improvement in that quarter! But since we (core devs) have live and running tg1 applications out there the itch is already there and we’ll make sure to scratch it.
As an example, Paris Envies is a TurboGears 1.1 application, coming from an 1.0 background, using Genshi, SQLObject and TGWidgets. And I know for sure that Jon has a real incentive to move to TG2 and get SO support for it :)
Stay tuned people, TurboGears is live and well!
May 27th, 2009 by Mark Ramm
The long wait is finally over!
I am happy to announce the release of TurboGears 2.0 final. This release is the product of a lot of work by the whole TurboGears team, and we’re very happy to have a final stable release. TurboGears 2.0 final includes all kinds of goodies for those making web applications, from one of the most powerful and flexible Object Relational Mappers available in any language, to a powerful and flexible template system. But just as important as the quality of the parts, is the out-of-the-box integration to help get you started quickly:
- We have quickstart template that helps get you going quickly with everything you need: from sample templates, to sample controllers and tests.
- We have an extensible user/groups/permission system that you can easily configure into your app when quickstarting a project.
- We have zero config needed support for development database backed by SQLite.
- We have a working admin system for editing your database while your app is in development.
- Our admin system is extensible and reusable as a component of your application.
There’s lots more. But equally important, we don’t think that out of the box defaults should be constraints on our users. So, a trivial configuration change lets you use DB2, or Oracle, or SQLServer, and everything we’ve wired up for you is easy enough to customize or replace. For example, we support configs for three major python template engines out of the box, and you can easily make your own render function to handle anything else you want.
One of the goals of TurboGears 2 is to use standard python components, that are valuable in all kinds of other contexts, so you are not tied into one monolythic system. Learning SQLAlchemy can help you write command line tools, GUI apps, web-services that don’t use a framework; Genshi is valuable when generating all kinds of xml data for interchange between systems; the beaker is a great caching system that’s valuable in all kind of web contexts, etc.
TurboGears 2 final is just now comming out, but it’s already in production use at places like ShootQ, RedHat? (for a large set of Fedora infrastructure projects) and many other places. And we’re already looking forward to a few more high profile TG2 deployments in the next few weeks.
April 9th, 2009 by Mark Ramm
I’ve been at SourceForge for a couple of months now, it’s been great, the work is surprisingly fun and rewarding. There’s a local office, and so I actually get to g and hang out with smart people whenever I want. I can still work from home, but having someplace to go in to has been a refreshing change.
I haven’t gotten to know many people outside the engineering team in Dexter, but they are great guys.
There’s lots of good stuff happening here, support for bazar, mercurial, git, trac, and other options on SourceForge itself, improved feeds, and other API’s for getting at SF data, etc. But I’m only peripherally aware of all that at the moment because I was hired to work on “totally new stuff” which is written in Python.
What I’m working on
Our first new project is a site called FossFor.Us, and it was the vision for this site, and the team that is working on this and other new stuff, that sold me on the coming to work for Sourceforge. It’s written in Django, and it’s been my first really large Django project, and while the experience has been pretty positive, there have been a number of things that have renewed my commitment to TurboGears development — but that’s a blog post for another day.
The backstory to the FossFor.Us site is that open source project hosting providers (Sourceforge and it’s recent competitors) have traditionally been pulled in two very different directions by two very different sets of users:
- developers of open source software
- and people who just want to.
And that tension has held us back in the past, we have to serve everybody with the same portal, and it ends up not serving either community as well as it should. But since developers are the most vocal users, it’s been the second class of user that’s been most neglected.
These people are just looking to get things done, and don’t care about the “project” part of open source software, they are, at least at first, only interested in the “product.” In many ways the Free and Open Source Software community has not served these people well.
Fossfor.us is in it’s first incarnation an attempt to create a window on the free software world, that’s just about finding and using software. But in a larger sense it’s an attempt to help us as a community to connect with potential users better.
I think connecting FOSS geeks and users is actually important
It’s important because people aren’t aware that there are free options, and are paying for software they can’t afford. There’s a prototypical user (based on a real person) that we talk about a lot, who’s a single mom, has an old laptop, and struggles week to week to pay her bills, but who bought Photoshop, because “that’s how you edit photos.” Her family could have used that money to more productive ends, but because she needed to edit photos, and didn’t know about the free alternatives all those opportunities are just lost.
Of course the same thing is true of small business owners, who could use free software to reduce their “overhead” costs, and actually spend money on creating things people love. Free software has the potential to lubricate the wheels of the economy, encourage entrepreneurial activity, and enrich people’s lives.
All of this is to say I think fossfor.us is a way to serve the world by making the product of all the open source developer’s labor more easily available and more accessible to real people. And when my mom actually used it to find some software a couple weeks ago, I knew we’d done something right.