Project Goals
Create great web apps faster!
That's it. That's the goal of TurboGears … That and to make it easier: The two goals are to create web apps faster and easier … And more fun: The three goals are to …
How does TurboGears do it?
- By making it as easy as writing a method to expose functionality to the web
- By allowing you to seamlessly provide nice HTML or an API for JavaScript to work with
- By giving your designers room to work with any XHTML tool to create great layouts
- By letting you use your database without writing SQL
- By filling in gaps in JavaScript, so that you'll actually enjoy writing it!
- By using a language that is clear, concise and dynamic
Components
More than the sum of its parts!
TurboGears takes the best components available and combines them into one easy-to-install, documented whole. TurboGears includes parts that join the pieces together and make them work together seamlessly, but doesn't obscure each included project. This allows you to take advantage of all existing documentation, articles, mailing lists and other resources that have built up in the communities for each project.
From frontend to backend:
- MochiKit is a clean and powerful JavaScript library
- Genshi is a designer- and programmer-friendly template system
- CherryPy makes doing web input/output as easy as writing a Python function!
- SQLAlchemy lets you access your database as you would normal Python classes, without obscuring the database itself.
Now that you know a bit about the parts of TurboGears, read more about how TurboGears ties it all together.
But, wait! There's more!
If TurboGears were a movie and the four projects above were the main actors, we'd still need key grips, caterers and the like. Here are some of the other bits of infrastructure needed for TurboGears:
- ElementTree is an easy-to-use and blazingly fast XML library.
- FormEncode provides a simple and extensible validation framework.
- Nose extends standard Python unittest features to make running your tests easier.
- json-py does round trip conversions between Python and the JSON format.
Project Philosophy
TurboGears plays well with others! The Project Philosophy is all about building on the work of great open source projects, not replacing or supplanting them.
License
All parts of TurboGears are released under liberal open source licenses that allow for use in both non-commercial and commercial projects. Whether your work is open source or closed source, TurboGears is free for your use.
The complete detail is on the license page.
Documentation
The TurboGears 1 documentation is maintained in our documentation wiki.
Development Status
TurboGears 1.1 is released!
The recommended and stable release of TurboGears 1 is 1.1. Read more about the development status.
Please note that there is also TurboGears 2, a reinvention of the TurboGears based on Pylons. TurboGears 2 is mostly API compatible with TG 1 but not completely, so if you are looking for 100% compatibility with your TG 1 applications, we suggest you try out TG 1.1.
