FUD and TurboGears
It’s been said that TurboGears is dead.
I’ve recently heard “the author of the TurboGears book is using Django now” as part of a Django enthusiast’s argument that TurboGears is dead. This cracks me up, because I’m the author in question, and I see the exact oposite. I’m learning Django to make TurboGears better, not because it’s dying.
And if you take a look at the trac logs for the last month, I think you’ll find that TurboGears is far from dead. We’ve got a thriving community formed around the stable 1.0.x branch, and we’ve got a very cool 2.0 branch approaching a release in the next few weeks. And we’ve got the best team of people working on the project we’ve ever had.
I’m organizing TurboGears sprints, writing TurboGears code, and trying to finish up a near-complete rewrite of the core turbogears code (to make TurboGears 2), and from this perspective things look pretty good.
TurboGears is alive and well.
Just because I, and other TurboGears developers are dedicated to learning about how others solve the same problems, and to finding ways to work together with the rest of the Python Web Framework world does not mean that our project is dead. In fact, I think quite the opposite is true, it’s evidence that we have a healthy framework and a healthy culture that’s open to learning from others.
UPDATE: I’m not suggesting that the django enthusiast I was talking to had bad motives a desire to spread FUD, or anything more than bad information. But that information, told that way, does nothing more than spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about the future of TurboGears.
Who was the Django “enthusiast”? I’d like to have a word with him/her…
James,
I don’t think it matters. It wasn’t anybody famous ;) and I don’t think they had anything against TurboGears, it was just what they “heard” from somewhere.
I also got an e-mail from someone last night telling me they “heard” the same thing from a friend of theirs in another part of the country. So, it seemed like there was some kind of strange meme going around, and it seemed to be worth refuting right away.
As a contributor to the TurboGears project for more than a year now, I can safely vouch for the TG community being alive. In fact, the number of contributors to the codebase has been steadily increasing during the last few months.
That being said, the project lacks a little bit in terms of visibility and marketing effort. So, if you are looking for a way to contribute to TurboGears, why not consider becoming our chief evangelist ;-) Send enquiries and applications to the TurboGears mailing list.
Chris
I read your blog entry on your learning about Django the other day and did not come away with any sort of feeling that you were dumping Turbogears at all. So, I get the feeling that there is FUD out there somewhere.
I can’t wait for TG2!!!
In other news, noted Django user Simon Willison has migrated to GWT and iBatis as his framework of choice
Keep up your work. Even though Im not involved with TG but django I cant agree more, you can only gain more by learning what others are doing. I went from php to rails to django. If i had went streight from php to django i think i wouldnt be as good on django as i am.
@Testmont Dudu: “noted Django user”? Simon is one of Django original developers:
http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/faq/#who-s-behind-this
Credit where credit is due.
@Testmont Dudu: GWT and iBatis? That was a good one. Thanks for the good humour.
Hm, I really hope I didn’t contribute to this — I did make a one-sentence comment when someone linked to your post on reddit because I thought your connection with TurboGears was one of the things that made your post worth reading, and the submitter hadn’t mentioned it.
My comment was the antithesis of “Foo sux, Bar rulez!” in spirit, but I’ve deleted it just to be safe. Some people have a hard time with the idea that programming languages and tools are not sports teams.
It’s kind of funny to think of somebody reading a 2-point comment on a 0-point story on reddit and having that turn into “Hey Mark, I heard…”
Definitely looking forward to TG 2.0 and any cross-pollination with Django that comes out of it.
Testmont Dudu: Yea, I heard that. The TurboGears dev team has been working on a new song and dance number titled:
“Screw it all, I’m going back to Struts.”
Hopefully we’ll get a stage at PyCon where we can tap-dance, cause that’ll be the best lightning talk ever.
Paul, Simon:
I doubt that anybody did anything “wrong” somebody misread the article while skimming, or even just read the title, and they told somebody who told somebody…
No big deal, except that that misunderstanding ballooned it could have a negative impact on TG in the long run.
Thanks for all your support. I think the python community is awesome!
Not dead, not pining for the fjords, not even close.
I’m a Django user/developer/committer, but I’m eager to participate in the TG2 sprint next weekend. I can say the same for at least three other Djangoists here in Colorado–we don’t want Django to crowd other good solutions out. Competition is good and healthy and we’re excited to learn more about TG and share anything we’ve learned in Django that might be applicable.
Hi, I hope I haven’t contributed to that FUD, but I stated some times that TurboGears is dead after I was terrible annoyed because of the broken template plugin stuff.
Speaking of which, is there a chance that this fill be fixed before TG2?
Regards,
Armin
Armin,
I’m sorry to hear that you are terribly annoyed about something in TG. I think what you are refering to is the config for plugins that is both not separated by plugin and sent in too early. It took me some rooting around in Trac to find a report on this issue, and I couldn’t find you anywhere in any trac ticket or anywhere on the mailing list. So, let me know if I haven’t found the right thing.
In TG2 we don’t prepare an engine until it is first called, so unused template engines should not be loaded. We also use the Pylons template config list, so everything can have it’s own template options.
I do note that there’s a ticket for this against TG 1.1 and it may have been pushed back to then because there’s a lot of config/initialization reorganization work scheduled to be done in 1.1
But, if this is a pressing issue for you, or for Jinja users let me know and I’ll see if we can update the priority a bit.
And thanks again for bringing this to our attention again.