> TurboGears has some problem which I don't think can be overcome: > > 1. Unfamiliar templating language. The UI for the "user" section of > this site will be coded by someone other than me. That someone is > already familiar with the Smarty PHP templating system. And would be > reluctant to switch to Genshi or Cheetah.
I don't think the unwillingness of someone to adapt to a new (and IHMO better, but that's not the point) way of template design can be hold against TG - or any other Framework. Or do you suggest PHP changes so that a TG developer feels better working with it? > 2. Need to restart the server. This is the big one, and my major > gripe with TurboGears. It has two major sub-problems: > > a. Whenever a single page (template) on the site is changed, the > server process needs to be restarted. This results in down-time (even > if only a couple of seconds). It also requires that template > designers, potentially unaware of their actions, have access to a site- > restart mechanism. > > b. If controller code is changed, and has significant bugs for some > reason, this causes the server process to die, or refuse to start. > This can cause even more down-time. > > As much as I hate many aspects of PHP, at least it doesn't suffer from > this problem. From these comments I conclude that you have a development model found often in the PHP-world: one, and only one version, the live system, running & being subject to changes of the developers. Which is certainly not the way "to develop a potentially very large social networking site for my employer". The professional way to go there is to have at least one if not several (read "every devolper/webdesigner" on his/her machine) instance of your web-app, most probably a staging system to test and finally the live-system. Which isn't subject to template/controller/whatever-changes provoking these restarts. > 3. Stability. I already have one site running with TG, and it cops a > reasonable amount of traffic. And it dies every couple of days. The > server process doesn't crash, it just stalls, and the whole site > becomes unresponsive. I'm having a smaller site with a fairly complex data model + AJAX pages live which runs just fine for weeks. One has to admit though that the combination of the very stable apache + PHP instead of a actual server process is unbeaten wrt to that. But I'm not under the impression that TG is generally unstable, or more unstable than other "real" server systems found e.g. in the Java-world. > For these reasons, I don't think I can use TG for the entire site. I > am, however, considering a split system. Wherein I use PHP/Mojavi/ > Smarty for the site's "user" section. And I use TG for the "admin" > section. The admin section will be coded entirely by me, including > UI. And it won't cop a lot of traffic, and so will be less likely to > hang. > > My questions: > > 1. Has anyone used TG in this way before? Can anyone imagine benefits/ > drawbacks from doing this? Sure. It's not advisable to mix technologies if you don't have to. If you really find that TG isn't suited for "the" site, mixing TG with PHP will result in - a codebase understandable only from developers who know their way around in both worlds - lack of common core technologies such as database-abstraction-layers (either as 3rd-party-tools, or self-written frameworks), which in turn increase the likeliness of - sychronization problems code-wise and data-wise As someone who's been developing large PHP-sites as well, I'd say I personally prefer to develop in TG and if things get tough rather fix whatever makes TG puke. YMMV. But don't mix things. > 2. Can anyone comment on the TG problems I listed above (esp. item 2), > and tell us what you did to over-come them? I did so above. Diez --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
