Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears : Using Python to Create Ajax-Powered Sites
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<>“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 â??solution’ imaginable. It has relationships based on fields that change frequently, causing â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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.” â??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
This book will help experienced Web developers get productive with TurboGearsâ??fast. You’ll quickly build your first TurboGears Web applicationâ??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
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 Con... |
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| 02-08-08 | 3 | (NA) |
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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.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-10-04 04:31:30 EST)
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| 10-18-07 | 1 | (NA) |
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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.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2008-02-08 13:30:48 EST)
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| 07-11-07 | 3 | (NA) |
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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. (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-10-19 09:42:45 EST)
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| 06-22-07 | 4 | (NA) |
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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.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2007-07-11 21:03:40 EST)
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| 05-24-07 | 1 | (NA) |
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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. (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-07-07 21:21:00 EST)
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| 04-26-07 | 4 | (NA) |
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I ordered this book immediately after "discovering" TurboGears. It is full of useful information, but the editing and organization leave a lot to be desired.
It is VERY IMPORTANT to be familiar with Python, because a lot of the programming examples contain mistakes. Many of the issues look like search-and-replace problems, because half of the examples in a chapter might refer to a class named one thing, and the others might refer to a different name that is obviously the same thing if you are paying attention. Given that online documentation for TurboGears also seems somewhat disorganized and scattered, I'll be using this book as reference information while working on my first TG-based site. Since the book provides a ton of information about a broad range of topics (TurboGears is, after-all, a conglomeration of a bunch of separate technologies), I'm overlooking the editing errors and giving it a 4 out of 5. (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-07-04 18:59:31 EST)
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| 03-16-07 | 3 | 2\2 |
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I was somewhat disappointed with this book, although I still found it to be useful for learning TurboGears. I won't mince words: the editing sucks. If you can get through the typos, though, you'll learn a fair amount and be better positioned to do something useful with TurboGears after you've read the book. Treat the book more as a tutorial than a reference.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2007-07-04 18:59:31 EST)
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| 03-09-07 | 1 | 4\6 |
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Please do us all a favor and boycot any book that relies on sample code to understand and learn how to use and doesn't bother to test the sample code. Most of the examples in the book do not work and you can expect to spend a great deal of time figuring out where the errors are. As a bare minimum a web site with downloadable corrected code should be provided. If all of the mistakes in the code were corrected I would strongly recommend the book.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2007-07-04 18:59:31 EST)
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| 02-11-07 | 5 | 1\3 |
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Yes, there are tons of errors. But they are all minor and good for the readers; for these errors are not conceptual blunders that mislead readers. They are errors that make readers think harder. No, I am not advocating that authors should inject errors into their books on purpose. I am saying that minor errors are not so critical as to be given undue weight in judging a book.
The book and the authors deserve ten stars because of the insight, clarity and happiness they bring. (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-07-04 18:59:31 EST)
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| 02-10-07 | 5 | 1\2 |
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Yes, there are tons of errors. But they are all minor and good for the readers; for these errors are not conceptual blunders that mislead readers. They are errors that make readers think harder. No, I am not advocating that authors should inject errors into their books on purpose. I am saying that minor errors are not so critical as to be given undue weight in judging a book.
The book and the authors deserve ten stars because of the insight, clarity and happiness they bring. (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-03-10 08:24:26 EST)
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| 01-31-07 | 4 | (NA) |
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As a retired geologist and weekend 'code warrior', this book nicely tied all the components of TG together. (I now know that Ajax is more than a nifty cleaner.) Hopefully my spaghetti code is a thing of the past. My only complaint is that some of the example code seemed to have mistakes... which required me to re-read some sections... perhaps not a bad thing.
(Review Data Last Updated: 2007-02-20 11:39:21 EST)
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| 01-21-07 | 2 | 4\6 |
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I bought this book because I inherited a Turbogears-created website at work, and it seemed like a decent framework. The framework itself is still clearly having growing pains (it was REALLY tricky to get the right combination of versions-of-packages to get the website running on another platform), but the framework itself is NOT the subject of this review - the book is.
The first thing I've noticed is that the editors were apparently asleep. There are TONS of typos, and I haven't even progressed past the first third of the book in terms of doing the tutorials. I don't recommend anyone try to use this book to LEARN anything about how it all fits together - the code was obviously never actually run in some circumstances (clear typos in the code caused me to have to edit the examples given - the "Bookmarker" example in Chapter 4 is a perfect example of this.) Short shrift is also given to anyone who's not intimately familiar with large python projects - I understand that this is not intended to be a python tutorial, but better explanation of flow-of-control is warranted in a lot of cases. I suppose the more advanced topics might be more useful - given the amount of trouble I'm having with the introductory material, though, I may never find out. I don't recommend this book to anyone who's trying to set up turbogears for the first time - I struggled mightily with a few Python-related issues, and the book was no help at all. I'm also REALLY disappointed that the majority of other reviewers of this book are people with a financial interest in it. This, alone, should be a big tipoff. I will probably wind up getting decent use out of the book - my work project isn't going away soon, and TurboGears as a framework seems decent. But I'm certainly glad I paid less than $25 for it (from a seller I assume must have had a used copy, though it was sold as "new"), and I don't recommend anyone else pay more. Disappointing. (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-02-20 11:39:21 EST)
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| 01-17-07 | 4 | 3\3 |
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This book gave me the overall introduction I needed before diving into my first TurboGears project. Without this book, I would have had trouble seeing the "big picture" and how all the pieces fit together. I would definitely recommend it to those who are new to web development.
Most of this book is great, but a few of these chapters are quite out of order. The "reference section" chapters that are written by Gigi Sayfan are absolutely excellent and a joy to read (chapters 10 - 22). The guided tour of the "WhatWhat Status" code in chapters 6 - 9 are not very organized, and they did nothing but confuse me until AFTER I had read chapters 10 - 22. Chapters 1 - 5 provide "first steps" instructions, and are well-written. After reading this book, I am convinced that TurboGears is in fact the best web framework available today. However, the skills and libraries that you learn in this book are not only applicable to TurboGears, but ANY web development system because TurboGears is a combination of the best open-source tools available. You can apply SqlObject, MochiKit, and CherryPy in almost any web development framework, and so even if you do not end up using TurboGears, the time spent reading this book will still be a good investment of your time. ~Christopher Sebastian (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-02-20 11:39:21 EST)
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| 11-18-06 | 5 | 13\13 |
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For what it's worth, I participated in the proofreading process and I still purchased the print version.
I happen to believe that Python will be the next programming language of choice for mainstream IT, and TurboGears makes it easier to build maintainable, cleanly architected web applications using Python. This book will be a foundation element of the growing TurboGears ecosystem, as it nicely complements the online documentation for TurboGears and the various frameworks that TG builds atop. The authors have a very casual narrative style to their writing, which greatly aids the overall readability of the book. It's almost as if you're reading the transcript of a top-notch training session. The base text is accompanied by a number of diagrams, tables, example snippets, annotations, sidebars, and screenshots. If you like to skim through your books, you'll feel right at home with this one. The books covers the entire vertical application stack from JavaScript down to basic Sqlite database installation and setup, and the entire application creation lifecycle from installing TurboGears to production deployment. I think that there is a second unintended audience for this book, namely those developers interested in building Ajax apps using MochiKit, even if they aren't using TurboGears (or Python) for their backend server development. MochiKit is the brilliant and highly acclaimed JavaScript framework created by Bob Ippolito that "makes JavaScript suck less". MochiKit is featured as a core element of the TurboGears application stack, and this book features more than 80 pages dedicated to MochiKit. In closing, the authors did a great job on this book. I highly recommend it. --Mike (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-02-20 11:39:21 EST)
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| 11-17-06 | 4 | 7\7 |
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Please note that the remark by another reviewer that reviews prior to November 16 are not valid is quite wrong. Though I am writing this on 17 November, I received a copy of this book a week ago, from the publisher. In general, many publishers regularly ship books to some reviewers, before the general release of those books to merchants. Precisely because the publishers want those reviewers to give reviews when or just before the books are available to the public.
If you are contemplating this book, you need to already be conversant in Python. You have undoubtedly heard how Ajax has revolutionised the user interface design of web pages. Well, TurboGears is a nice melding of the Ajax approach with Python coding. Also, it lets you more easily implement the Model-View-Controller design pattern on the server side, when you are making dynamic web pages. MVC is a tremendous simplification of the design, but in practice there can be lots of grubby details to trip you over. The book offers you both the Ajax and the MVC as relatively easy approaches. On the model side, TurboGears has a SQLObject that hooks up to a relational database. The SQLObject handles the impedance mismatch between a pure object oriented design and the reality that you often have to deal with relational databases. For the latter, the book uses the example of SQLite. But the latter should not be seen as unduly restrictive. If you can understand the code examples that use SQLite, you should be able to reimplement in another SQL choice. Perhaps the best thing about TurboGears is that it offers you quicker coding in Ajax and MVC. And also the prospect of safer coding. Since the TurboGears code is more likely to have been debugged by many others than new code that you're writing. Plus, the promise of a simpler design implementation also reduces chances of bugs. (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-02-20 11:39:21 EST)
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| 11-17-06 | 1 | 4\26 |
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Please note that any 'review' prior to november 16th, 2006 is invalid as the book has only now been shipped. I made a pre-order a month ago and only today received notice from amazon that it's on its way. While I don't discourage authors from remarking on their book, nor comments from the online previews, it's important to note that no actual reader has in fact reviewed the book _in hand_.
yes, we're all looking forward to turbogears. I'm sure I'll love it too, but let's not get carried away just yet. For the authors to give themselves 5 stars seems unnecessary. If authors wish to comment, amazon should allow them to do so, but without a star rating. I'll review again in time, and if I enjoy it I'll up the star rating accordingly. This is in fact THE POINT of having a star rating, not for authors to make a blog entry. Therefore this 1 star will balance out the 5 stars made by both authors here. Otherwise these star ratings lose their usefulness for us, y'know, the paying public. thanks (Review Data Last Updated: 2007-02-20 11:39:21 EST)
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| 11-13-06 | 5 | 6\7 |
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When writing a computer book, there's usually a tension between creating a reference work and creating a tutorial-style book. This book takes on both approaches, which I think is exactly what's needed in a book for TurboGears.
The first half of the book teaches you TurboGears from the perspective of how a couple of realistic applications are put together. I've always found it productive to read through existing code to learn how to get things done, and the first half explains the basics of getting things done nicely. TurboGears comes with a lot of software, and the second half of the book goes into detail on how to use the various components that TG includes. Gigi and Mark spend quite a bit of time going through SQLObject, I covered MochiKit, Remi Delon (project leader for CherryPy) helped out with deployment topics, Simon Belak (who has done a lot of work on TG's error handling) helped out with some TurboGears controller-related sections. We put in a lot of work to cover all of the parts of the system in enough detail that you'll find the answers to most questions in the second part of the book. Mark did a great job of writing and pulling this book together. It is a great resource for users of TG, and I'm proud to have been a part of its creation. (Review Data Last Updated: 2006-11-28 13:43:09 EST)
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| 11-13-06 | 5 | 5\5 |
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I just bought the book, but I have read several chapters already and I can't wait the book to arrive to read the rest.
Turbogears is, IMHO, one of the best frameworks around, and the best python based. If you like python Turbogears is the right framework for you, if you don't know python give it a try. With "Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears" you will go from 0 to 100 in no time, and at the same time you will support the project. (Review Data Last Updated: 2006-11-28 13:43:09 EST)
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| 11-11-06 | 5 | 5\9 |
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At PyCon 2005 there was a lot of talk about how fragmented the Python world's web development efforts were. People complained that attention was spread too thin, and that innovation wasn't being rewarded because it just took too much time to wade through all the options. But without that diversity TurboGears would not have been possible.
TurboGears brings together some of the best web programming tools available in Python -- and in the process moves the state of the art forward in web framework world. Before TurboGears I used ASP, PHP, Struts, and Rails, and I found thinks that I liked in each of those worlds. But TurboGears won me over with little things like the powerful, extensible, and clean template syntax, the ajax support, and the well designed API's. This book covers TurboGears as a whole, with an emphasis on getting you up to speed quickly, and then diving into real-world open source projects rather than continuing to use toy examples. We also have in-depth coverage of several existing python libraries SQLObject, CherryPy, MochiKit and Kid, which are valuable to uses of these tools -- even outside of th TurboGears context. I'm rating the TurboGears framework 5 stars, but as the primary author I'll have to leave it up to you all to rate the book itself. (Review Data Last Updated: 2006-11-28 13:43:09 EST)
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