Bruce Eckel’s writeup posted to Artima tonight. He did a good job of capturing the blow-by-blow on our progression through TurboGears.

The last day consisted of a steady morning of TurboGears activity followed by lunch, a great hike, and wrapping up with a podcast that summarized our experiences in the different areas. I’ll add a link as that becomes available. I didn’t get into the testing capabilities bundled with TurboGears to the degree I had wanted, so I’ll have to do that later and blog about it.

We also rented bikes for hitting the Lower Loop at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow; I eneded up with a Gary Fisher Piranha from The Alpineer. It’s not quite my Hoo Koo E Koo, but at least it has the same Genesis geometry; that Specialized bike I rode on Monday was a dog, though that was mostly due to it being horribly unmaintained. The geometry on it was really awkward for me as well.

By the end of today, I feel quite confident that TurboGears holds great potential as a productive web application framework. We went through all of the 20-Minute Wiki and TurboTunes tutorials. It would take a full-blown article to cover the stuff I’ve seen, but for now, I will just highlight some of the features that surprised me.

Despite the youth of the TurboGears project, they seem to have already realized the important of a useful toolset. With a simple command-line tg-admin toolbox from the root of my TurboTunes tutorial workspace, I found an impressive little bundle of tools there at my disposal:

What’s CatWalk? A web application to browse my domain model? No way, you must be kidding! Nope:

Lo and behold, my domain model, with one-to-many and many-to-many relationships, browsable and editable right there. Wow. I had also noticed a Model Designer, and set my expectations to what I thought was an appropriate “lowness”. Not necessary:

That is the sample model for the domain I had manually created, represented in diagram form. I have yet to see any tools like this for Rails, though they may exist. The “pythonic” nature of the MVC components of a TurboGears application has an aesthetic that totally appeals to me. I also noticed that unit testing code is stubbed out and ready to be run using Nose. Looking forward to learning more about that.

The second day of the WFJ for me was the second half of my journey up the learning curve on installing TurboGears (TG) on Debian with Python 2.3 and 2.4 installed. The predicament seems to have been that 2.3 is still the default Python version, even in sid, and the python-turbogears package is targeted for 2.4. The package does not pull in at least one of its dependencies, so I was finally relegated to trying a manual installation. Once I figured out that easy_install-2.4 allowed me to install the necessary Python eggs into my /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages directory, I was all set to go with TurboGears 0.9a6.

Once TG was installed, the rate at which we were able to progress into the tutorial was impressive. I think if we’d been more familiar with how Python libraries are handled, we would have been much farther along. This, of course, is a great motivation for me to give attention to the Debian package so that at least one Linux distro can have a great out-of-the-box TG experience.

We kicked off the Web Frameworks Jam today, and so far it looks like another great event. We ended up sorting into three groups, one for TurboGears, one for Spring/Hibernate, and one for the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Bruce, Dianne, and I are the TurboGears group. I was on the fence between Ruby on Rails and TurboGears, but since I would have been the only person looking at Rails, that I would’ve forfeited the benefit of the group.

I didn’t make much progress today; it seems I am a victim of Debian’s Python 2.3 to 2.4 transition and a rather nascent python-turbogears package in Debian. I am learning about Python package management and parallel installs of multiple Python versions, which is something I have been meaning to learn anyway. Hoping for a more productive day tomorrow; in the meantime I was able to file 5 bugs against the Debian TurboGears package along with some patches. We hiked around Lake Erwin in the middle of the day, which was a welcome pause from my installation and setup frustrations.

Man, it’s good to be back in Crested Butte. I rode the Lower Loop yesterday afternoon with my brother. What a beautiful trail for mountain biking. The Americanos at Camp 4 Coffee were something I’ve been missing as well.