On 10/17/05, Donnie Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not to start a possible flame war of any sorts... but, I am new to both > Turbogears and Ruby on Rails, and I was wondering if you all could help in > laying out some pros and cons of both, aka Turbogears versus Ruby on > Rails.
Seems like a reasonable thing to want, and not at all inflammatory. There's been some recent discussion (and there's a post on my blog, http://www.blueskyonmars.com, about this) where I've been talking about preferences. This is where comparisons get tricky. Ruby on Rails and TurboGears are definitely both geared toward making web applications (though our gears are "turbo" :) That means that they cover a lot of the same territory. You can reasonably do an app in either one. Your choice will largely depend on what is important and appeals to you. > Here are some that come to my mind, which may be incorrect, feel free to > opine. > > Turbogears: > * Python - has more documentation, libraries than Ruby. > * Proven toolkits brought together by TurboGears. I would also argue that Kid is better for producing web pages and MochiKit is a cleaner JavaScript library that brings familiar Python programming features to JavaScript. Those are matters of taste. > > Ruby on Rails: > * Existed longer than Turbogears, maybe more mature? > * Developed from ground up as one package? As Jeremy mentioned, big pieces of TurboGears are more mature than Rails. The whole package of Rails is definitely more mature than the whole package of TurboGears. Luckily, though, the integration code is a relatively small part of the whole. Rails has books and such, and we don't (yet). I actually believe that there is some benefit to TurboGears coming together from existing packages. Rails, though it's provided as a single, integrated package, is not a big mass of spaghetti. It's separate parts: Action Pack, Active Record, Scriptaculous. It just happens that TurboGears' separate parts came before TurboGears. This means that the mass of new ideas, code and docs that can benefit TurboGears is greater than it would be had I just released a behemoth new package. There are already lots of people using CherryPy and SQLObject for other projects, making the community that benefits TurboGears much larger than it would be otherwise. (One example of this: an SQLObject user is releasing Oracle drivers for SQLObject. This most definitely benefits TurboGears, but is not done because of TurboGears.) Rails has some features that we're lacking (eg scaffolding), but no showstoppers in my opinion. The extra libraries and support that you get from using Python could very well outweigh this. I'm not sure if all of this helps you or not. If there is a specific question about a feature or aspect of TurboGears that we can answer, fire away! Kevin
