Compound Thinking

Another TurboGears 2 sprint

In a week we’ll be having a sort-of-last-minute Worldwide TurboGears Sprint on Febuary 23rd. I’ll be traveling to Boulder to hack on TG2 and DBMechanic. And I’m sure there will be lots of people logging in to help out from all around the world.

With the WebOb integration done, TurboGears 2 is reasonably close to the point where we can do a preview release, but we need a lot of documentation, and improve our test coverage before I’ll feel comfortable with a preview.

There are some helper libraries (like the Identity authentication/authorization tools) which need TG2 equivalents, and these are absolutely critical before we can do a real release. I’m actually OK with doing a preview while some of these are missing, we can always add them as needed. But the base really needs to be solid and well tested before we do a release.

I’ve been spending time looking at other frameworks from Sprint and Struts, to Rails. And I’m very excited about what the python community has given us to work with. Without much effort of our own, we have the best database toolkit and ORM out there. I’m also supprised to see that TurboGears seems more committed to security by default than most of the other web-frameworks out there. We’ve always had automatic HTML excaping, and we don’t expose anything by default. These things seem obvious, but the aren’t as common as they should be.

I’m also very impressed with all the good WSGI based stuff that TG2 users will be able to pick-up and use easily.

Working together with Pylons has brought us lots of cool features, and the WSGI world is ablaze with interesting new middleware, and TG2 is now poised to take advantage of all that.

I think 2008 is going to be the best year for TurboGears yet.