> Recently there have been a number of requests for more clarity about
> the future of TurboGears, and since I've been involved heavily with a
> couple of experimental projects designed to help us explore our
> options, I'd like to help clarify things as best I can.

> A bit over a week ago several of us decided to get together in Atlanta
> this past weekend and hack on an experimental Pylons/TurboGears
> integration project.   We wanted to discover if we could re-implement
> the TurboGears API on top of paste+pylons in a way that would make
> TurboGears better.

> The goal was not just to re-implement things, but to see if that
> re-implementation actually improved the readability, flexibility, and
> ease-of-mantinance of the TurboGears project.  In other words, we
> wanted to make TurboGears: easier for new developers to work on,
> easier for us to maintain, and more flexible so we can take advantages
> new python web developments in the future.

> If you're interested in the details of the sprint, I blogged about it,
> and you can read it at:

> http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2007/06/27

> On all counts, I think we can now say that this experiment has been a
> huge success. And after lots of good discussion with Alberto, Kevin,
> and Ben Bangert from the Pylons project, the way forward is now much
> clearer.  The results of the sprint will become the basis for
> TurboGears 2.0.

> To make life easy for people who want to install TurboGears 2.0
> alongside the current version we will be creating a new package called
> tg for TurboGears 2.0.  And Alberto is planing to promote it out of
> the pygears branch into trunk today.

> The new tg package will implement a very large percentage of the
> current TurboGears API, and thus is intended to  provide an very easy
> upgrade path for current TurboGears users.  In particular current
> controller code should be very simple to port, and Kid, Genshi,
> SQLAlchemy, and SQLObject code will be supported, so most of your
> template and model code will require almost no changes, or will be be
> usable as is.

> There's still work being don on TurboGears 2, and it's hard to predict
> a release schedule in open source projects.   But if you pressed me I
> would say that I expect to see a beta in the next couple of months.
> It could be earlier, it could be later...   If you're the adventurous
> type and don't want to wait until then can check it out of subversion
> today, but expect a lot of rapid changed.

> At the same time the turbogears development team will continue to
> maintain and support TurboGears 1.x for our current users. We want to
> accommodate users who create new TG 1.0 projects for a long time, but
> we also want to make it easy for those who want the latest and
> greatest stuff to get started with TurboGears 2.0 as soon as possible.

> There will be a TurboGears 1.1 beta release in the next few weeks,
> which will fully support the current API, and will switch the default
> templating engine from Kid to Genshi, and the default ORM from
> SQLObject to SQLAlchemy.   This release will not include an upgrade to
> CherryPy 3, because that has required backwards incompatible changes,
> and has taken much more work than expected.  If someone wants to take
> up the standard, there may be a TurboGears 1.2 wiith CherryPy 3
> support, but as far as I know nobody had volenterred to do this.

> And of course, SQLObject and Kid will remain supported in 1.1, to give
> us full backwards compatability with current applications.  Catwalk
> and Model Designer will remain SQLObject only applications in 1.1.

> And that brings us back to TurboGears 2.0.  In addition to the current
> TurboGears API, the new tg package will support all kinds of new
> features that will make our user's life easier.  Many of these
> features are the direct result of our integration with Pylons, because
> we'll be getting access to a lot of great stuff they've already done.
> And we'll be sharing almost all of our infrastructure code with
> another group of great developers.

> The end result is that TurboGears users that have sites that need to
> scale up, will have have access to world class caching options
> (including memcached support), as well as a number of other
> performance enhancing features and options.   For the majority of us
> who are  more interested in rapid development, and deployment
> flexibility, than raw performance, TurboGears 2 will include all kinds
> of new features.   TurboGears 2 will also implement a more flexible
> Object Dispatch system, as well as direct Routes integration, so it
> will be even easier to get exactly the URL's you want.

> There's a lot more going on too like 1.1 TurboGears 2 will make Genshi
> and SQLAlchemy the defaults because they provide a better experience
> for the majority of web developers.  We won't be forcing our opinions
> on anybody, and other ORM's and templating engines will be supported,
> but  we'll be focusing all our documentation effort on those defaults.
>  We want to make very sure that our documentation tells a clear and
> compelling story about how this stack of components makes web
> development easier.

> At the same time, we'll be working to support people who want to
> develop and maintian sub-projects for automatic CRUD (like Catwalk or
> the Django interface) outside the TurboGears 2 core.  Our hope is that
> these tools will be broadly usable by anybody who is working withing
> the context of a framework that implements the Web Server Gateware
> Interface standard.   Ultimately I think Pylons, TurboGears, Paste,
> Zope, and all kinds of other python web developers toolkits will be
> working together on creating great tools for rapid development.

> Thanks to Pylons, Paste, SQLAlchemy, Genshi, Babel, and a whole host
> of other contributions from around the web TurboGears development is
> getting easier and more fun.   I for one, am really looking forward to
> all the good things that are in the pipeline!

> I'm looking forward to some spirited discussion of the TurboGears 2.0
> plan, and the plan for  TurboGears 1.1 on the TurboGears trunk mailng
> list.

> (http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears-trunk)

> --
> Mark Ramm-Christensen
> email: mark at compoundthinking dot com
> blog:www.compoundthinking.com/blog