What should we do with Dojo?

[Alessandro Molina]

I would like to propose the idea of removing from the documentation of
TG and from tgext.crud the dojo related parts.

I know that it doesn't sound a great idea at first sight, but let me
explain my reasons:

- First of all most of the things we currently do using Dojo can be
easily replicated and be more agnostic without it. Actually some of
them, like pagination on tgext.crud are already available since a few
releases even in the plain HTML version.

- Many tg+dojo bindings are currently unmaintained and have issues,
like using Sprox+Dojo and tgext.crud+dojo

- On tgext.crud dojo has been disabled by default as wasn't working
to many people, probably related to tw.dojo somehow but as it seems
that even tw.dojo isn't getting much love recently no one had time to
fix it.

- It seems that there is no one interested in maintaining those parts
of code, they are broken since around 8 months ago and they still are.

- We don't have enough resources to be able to maintain multiple
versions of the same tools (crud with and without dojo) and doc
(tutorial using and not using dojo).

If we want to improve the Widgets/FrontEnd/JavaScript layer of TG as
Christoph Zwerschke was suggesting at the last metting cleaning up the
currently frontend related parts of tg might be a required step and
even if we choose to use Dojo as our foundation for the frontend part
I doubt that the current dojo related code might be useful as a
starting point.

What do you think?

[Christoph Zwerschke]

Actually, I haven't used any tgext stuff so far because I considered it
too unstable and underdocumented to be used in real-world projects. So I
can only comment from an uneducated point of view. But your article
http://blog.axant.it/archives/423 gets me interested again.

As far as I understand, tgext.crud makes use of sprox.dojo which uses a
Dojox.grid.DataGrid via tw.dojo (Dojox is to Dojo what TGExt is to TG).

I think the main problem here is that tw.dojo is pretty much a dead
project - download links do not work and its successor tw2.dojo has not
been released yet and seen no updates for 2 years either. Meanwhile,
Dojo has evolved quite a lot, and there are already two successors
(dgrid and gridx) for the old Dojox grid
(http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2011/10/26/introducing-the-next-grid-dgrid/).

So, I agree that it's best to disable Dojo support in tgext.crud.

Ideally, tw2.dojo and tw2.jquery will be updated, then Sprox will be
updated to use the new Dojo dgrid and alternatively jqGrid, and then
tgext.crud will be made configurable to use plain HTML, dgrid or jqGrid.

But that's a long way to go, and though it sounds interesting, I'm not
sure whether I'll have enough time this year to work on such stuff. I
currently see myself working more and more on client side code and am
not so much using server side frameworks such as TG or TW any more.

-- Christoph

[Michael Pedersen]

I'm leaning towards disabling by default myself. We have a lot of good (even great) things about TurboGears, and high on that list is that we don't force people to use pretty much anything. One failure we have in that regard, though, is that we haven't chosen (and stuck with) a JS library. At this point in web land, jQuery seems to rule the roost, and I'd like to make that the default choice that we tell people to use, and provide ways to use the others.

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[Christoph Zwerschke]

Am 23.02.2012 04:29, schrieb Michael Pedersen:
> At this point in web land, jQuery seems to rule the roost, and I'd
> like to make that the default choice that we tell people to use, and
> provide ways to use the others.

I think that boils down to that somebody needs to bring tw2.jquery back
into shape. Another idea would be to make use of Bootstrap (for
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/) - it could be included as part of
the default quickstart app and/or its jQuery plugins could be provided
through a tw2.bootstrap as an alternative to jquery.ui.

-- Christoph

[Michael Pedersen]

I have no object to providing ways to use Bootstrap, especially if it's just a set of jQuery plugins. From reading a (very) little about it, though, it looks like it might be an alternative, instead, and that I'll have issues with providing in the defaults. Provide a way to use it, but just don't make it the default.

-- Christoph

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[Christoph Zwerschke]

Am 24.02.2012 05:34, schrieb Michael Pedersen:
> I have no object to providing ways to use Bootstrap, especially if it's
> just a set of jQuery plugins. From reading a (very) little about it,
> though, it looks like it might be an alternative, instead, and that I'll
> have issues with providing in the defaults. Provide a way to use it, but
> just don't make it the default.

The HTML and CSS files of Bootstrap can be used without the jQuery
Plugins. They could be used instead of our current quickstart templates.
The jQuery plugins are only an addition to that, I understand them as an
alternative to jQuery UI.

In think we have decided to support jQuery as default JS library, but
jQuery itself provides no widgets. jQuery UI would be a natural choice,
but it's a bit limited and developing slowly. Bootstrap plugins are an
alternative, also jQuery Tools, Kendo UI, Ninja UI (all jQuery based).

-- Christoph

[Michael Pedersen]

Okay, I misunderstood the role of the various pieces in this case. I'll admit to being less than godlike, and hope I didn't ruin anybody's perceptions of me :)

At this point, I'm thinking we should hold off on trying to package such things ourselves. TW2 is supposed to come out really soon now, and they may already have these things packaged up. Once we have that, we might want to choose from what they provide, or package our own and provide it.

Is that an acceptable compromise?

-- Christoph

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