TurboGears joins the PylonsProject
Mark Ramm
mailing list about how we should respond to the Repoze.bfg / Pylons
merger. We've had a couple of IRC chats, I've spent a lot of time
talking to various people in the community, and even more talking to
Ben Bangert and Chris McDonough.
And I believe we've come to a solid consensus, and that it's time to
make a decision.
I didn't want to rush this, and very much wanted to weigh all the
options appropriately. But now that that thinking is done, it's time
to jump in with both feet.
TurboGears will be merging into the Pylons Project
To understand why we are making this move and what this means, a bit
of background is needed.
We built TurboGears 2 on top of a the Pylons framework, and have been
working with Ben and the Pylons folks for a couple of years now.
Pylons is a lightweight framework that is neither full stack nor
opinionated. The Pylons team has recently joined up with the
repoze.bfg folks to create a new low-level non-opinionated web
application development library called Pyramid which is based on
repoze.bfg and now part of the larger Pylons Project.
You can use Pyramid to build web applications right now. It has more
plug points, and is in many ways more flexible and extendable than the
original Pylons and should provide an even better foundation for a
full stack framework.
Fortunately the Pylons Project leaders recognize that a "low level"
framework is not enough. Most web developers need to get things done
quickly, and want a full stack setup and ready to go, so they can
immediately start developing features rather than infrastructure.
That's where we come in. TurboGears was the pioneer of the "full
stack" set of integrated components approach among the modern Python
web frameworks, and we have already developed many full stack tools.
So, our first step will be to add the TurboGears2 package to the
legacy support in the Pylons Project. So, the Pylons 1.x and
Turbogears2 packages will be maintained side by side as part of a
single overall project. This change won't impact the TG2 code, except
that we will be officially acknowledging that both codebases are
tightly linked and now are part of a single project.
Maintaining the existing Pylons1+tg code will only be one part of the
larger Pylons Project.
Ultimately, we will also be working with the Pylons Project folks to
create a new generation of rapid application development tools on top
of Pyramid, as part of the TurboGears "Full Stack" philosophy. We will
help to pick default templating engines, default session support,
default data persistence mechanisms, integrate widget libraries and
build high level tools like OAuth or OpenID support.
The main goal of this merger will be to reach across framework
boundaries, work together with with Repoze, Pylons, and other web
framework developers to build a set of high level tools that make
building complex, modern web applications easier and faster. There's a
lot we can learn from each-other, and even more that we can do if we
work through our differences and find new ways to collaborate.
Over the next few weeks we'll be moving repositories, migrating
tickets, consolidating infrastructure, and discussing many exciting
new developments.
Thanks for your support. It's been a great ride, and I have a
feeling that the best is yet to come.
--
Mark Ramm
--
PS. Don't worry, TurboGears 1 will also continue to be maintained,
and supported, and we'll even have a major release soon. We don't
have all the details worked out yet, but you should also expect some
anouncments over the comming weeks about whatever changes that we'll
be making to that infrastructure.