<>“Dear PHP,

It’s over between us. You can keep the kitchen sink, but I want my MVC.

With TurboGears, I was able to shed the most heinous FileMaker Pro legacy ‘solution’ imaginable. It has relationships based on fields that change frequently, causing ‘disappearing data.’ I replaced it with an easy to maintain TurboGears application. Defunkifying and normalizing many years worth of munged data took twice as long as developing the TurboGears’s application itself. TurboGears’s excellent set of tools and best-of-breed approach makes it so easy to build applications quickly.”

—Isaac Csandl, Manager of Information Technology, Chicago Legal Search, Ltd.

“TurboGears has resulted in significant time savings for rPath. Before it was released, we expected to spend significant time building a Web framework for our rPath Appliance Agent product. TurboGears sharpens our focus on building a quality application; it allows us to provide more value to our customers, rather than reinventing the Web wheel.”

—Michael K. Johnson, rPath Founding Engineer and Coauthor of Linux Application Development, Second Edition

“I think this is the first time that a Web framework’s functionality has been so obvious.”

—Bruce Eckel, Author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

“TurboGears helped me build more complex Web applications more quickly and with fewer headaches than any other framework I’ve used. Just like Python itself, it made me more productive with a minimal learning curve.”

—Quentin Hartman, System Administrator

“TurboGears has changed the way I develop Web applications, from model, to view, to controller. Thanks to the power of TurboGears, I was able to develop the first version of WhatWhat in less than a week of my spare time.”

—Jonathan LaCour, Development Team Lead, Optio

“TurboGears has provided a way for me to greatly enhance my productivity by realizing the potential of Web-based agile development with Python.”

—Brandon Goldfedder, Vice President of Engineering, Information Extraction and Transport (IET Inc.), and Author of The Joy of Patterns

“TurboGears really changed the way I schedule project releases: It allows me to deliver them faster and with better quality than when I used to use GUI toolkits.”

—Jorge Godoy, Owner of G2C Tech Consultoria in Brazil, former Lead Developer for Conectiva documentation team

“With TurboGears, I was able to transition my Python projects into Web applications as easily as possible.”

—Benjamin T. Hamilton, Software Engineer

“Norwegian-based company Scanmine AS makes extensive use of Python and Turbo-Gears in all parts of its operation. TurboGears makes it a breeze to build highly sophisticated Web 2.0 applications with out-of-the-box features for multiple languages with full Unicode, REST, AJAX, RSS/Atom, and more. This enables Scanmine to put a face on their technology development in a minimal amount of time.

    “It has been said that there are as many Web frameworks as there are Python Web programmers. This apparent Web framework fragmentation has long been perceived as a weakness, until TurboGears came along and turned weakness into strength.”

—Rune Hansen, Senior Systems Designer, Scanmine AS

“TurboGears is a well thought-out framework; the design choices it has made will help you be more productive. TurboGears will give you confidence with its foundation of stable best-of-breed Python components. If you are coming from other languages, consider working in TurboGears and Python to bring fun back into your Web development work.”

—Jeff Marshall, Partner with FrozenBear

“When we started developing Oprius Foundations with TurboGears, we weren’t sure if it really would help us develop quicker and higher-quality code. After two months, we had a task manager to rival Tada List. After seven months, we had an entire contact management system to compete with the big boys.”

—Jason Chu, Lead Developer, Oprius Software Inc.

“Conventional programming wisdom states that rewriting any working project from scratch is a bad idea. TurboGears was good enough to convince me to do this anyway, and I have been nothing but thrilled with the results. With TurboGears, I was able to implement an AJAX-based Web site with a nice Web API more easily than I ever thought possible. If you are trying to do either of those in Python, you owe it to yourself to look at this project. Using TurboGears was one of the few times in my programming career where a task was significantly less complicated than I thought possible.”

—Adam Jones, Lead Programmer, RecursiveThought Software

Master TurboGears: The Easy Python Framework for Rapid Web Development

TurboGears harnesses the power of Python to provide a dynamic and easy-to-use Web development framework: one that
dramatically increases developer productivity, and makes it far easier to create dynamic, user-friendly, Ajax-enabled Web applications. Now, for the first time, there’s a definitive guide to TurboGears—coauthored by its creator, Kevin Dangoor.

This book will help experienced Web developers get productive with TurboGears—fast. You’ll quickly build your first TurboGears Web application—then extend it one step at a time, mastering the underlying libraries that make these enhancements possible. Next, the authors demonstrate TurboGears at work in a real-world application, by examining the code for “WhatWhat Status,” an open source project status tracking application. Finally, you’ll gain deep insight into the model, view, and controller technologies TurboGears is built upon: knowledge that will help you build far more robust and capable Python applications.

Coverage includes

• Understanding the architecture of a TurboGears application

• Mastering SQLObject, customizing it, and using it with TurboGears models

• Utilizing TurboGears view technologies, including dynamic templates and MochiKit for Ajax

• Bringing CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript together in reusable components with TurboGears Widgets

• Using CherryPy and TurboGears controller technologies: from decorators to deployment

• Exploring the TurboGears toolbox

• Ensuring security and managing user access permissions in TurboGears applications

Preface  xxiii

Acknowledgments  xxv

Part I: TurboGears Fundamentals

Chapter 1: Introduction to TurboGears  3

Chapter 2 Getting Started with TurboGears  13

Chapter 3: The Architecture of a TurboGears Application  25

Part II: Building a Simple TurboGears Application

Chapter 4: Creating a Simple Application  43

Chapter 5: Enhancing Our Bookmark Application  59

Part III: Exploring a Real World TurboGears Application

Chapter 6: Exploring More Complex Models in WhatWhat Status  83

Chapter 7: Controllers, Views, and JavaScript in the WhatWhat Status  97

Chapter 8: RSS, Cookies, and Dynamic Views in WhatWhat Status  115

Chapter 9: Ajax and WhatWhat Status Projects  133

Part IV: SQLObject and TurboGears Models

Chapter 10: SQLObject Basics  151

Chapter 11: Mastering SQLObject  165

Chapter 12: Customizing SQLObject Behavior  183

Part V: TurboGears View Technologies

Chapter 13: Dynamic Templates with Kid  209

Chapter 14: Creating Better JavaScript with MochiKit  225

Chapter 15: Effective Ajax with MochiKit  273

Chapter 16: TurboGears Widgets: Bringing CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript Together in Reusable Components . 309

Part VI: CherryPy and TurboGears Controller Technologies

Chapter 17: CherryPy and TurboGears Decorators  335

Chapter 18: TurboGears Deployment  355

Part VII: TurboGears Extras Chapter 19 The TurboGears Toolbox and Other Tools  371

Chapter 20: Internationalization  383

Chapter 21: Testing a TurboGears Application  397

Chapter 22: TurboGears Identity and Security  417

Part VIII: Appendix

Appendix: SQLAlchemy  431

Index  449

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 18 Ratings

I know computer books are obsolete in a short time, but come on. - 2007-05-23
Reviewer Rating:
The information in this book is completely out of date only a few months after it came out. Turbogears 2.0 is going to basically replace every component of TG 1.0. So I would not recommend buying this book unless you want to re-learn everything again when the Turbogears 1.0 codebase is abandoned (it largely already has been as developers move to 2.0 or other frameworks).

Turbogears is a good example of what happens when PR outruns project maturity, and fundamental decisions are abandoned late in a development cycle.

Frustrating Read - 2007-07-11
Reviewer Rating:
I'm working on a Turbogears app. I find it a good framework. The book, however, is frustrating to work with. I rarely have time to read computer books sequentially. I generally jump around trying to find answers to my questions. I'm not finding answers... just partial examples throughout.

For example, I would expect an AJAX example to have all the pieces necessary to implement an AJAX conversation with the file names clearly labeled. I would expect a diagram of how the pieces interact. What I find is little snippets of code without context and no diagrams anywhere in the book.

I think the authors did a reasonable job of explaining Turbogears from their perspective. It was the editors' job to push them to explain things from their audience's perspective. This has the look of a rush job.

Save your money - 2007-10-18
Reviewer Rating:
This book is terrible. The examples are incomplete and filled with typos. You will NOT learn Turbogears from this book, just how to be frustrated.

TG Review - 2008-02-08
Reviewer Rating:
The book is a basic start, some of the examples have errors in them and there is a leap from examples that map to the taught content to a project called whatwhat that has much more involved code without giving proper background.

Read once for the content, keep open as a reference. - 2007-06-22
Reviewer Rating:
I use this book daily. The book is a great read and walks the reader through many of the complexities of modern web-app development in a clear and easy style. Though there are plenty of gotchas throughout the book, the errata site has most of them nailed cold. The clarity of thought and insight into the rationale behind the design of TurboGears are well worth the price of entry. In addition to covering the current state of TurboGears, the book discusses many of the future options for the project, giving it life beyond the 1.0 version.

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