Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears: Using Python to Create Ajax-Powered Sites

Description

“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 ‘solu­tion’ imaginable. It has relationships based on fields that change frequently, causing ‘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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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 con
dence 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.”

—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.”

—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.”

—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
dramatically increases developer productivity, and makes it far easier to create dynamic, user-friendly, Ajax-enabled Web applications. Now, for the first time, there’s a definitive guide to TurboGears—coauthored by its creator, Kevin Dangoor.

 

This book will help experienced Web developers get productive with TurboGears—fast. You’ll quickly build your first TurboGears Web application—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

• Understanding the architecture of a TurboGears application
• Mastering SQLObject, customizing it, and using it with TurboGears models
• Utilizing TurboGears view technologies, including dynamic templates and MochiKit for Ajax
• Bringing CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript together in reusable components with TurboGears Widgets
• Using CherryPy and TurboGears controller technologies: from decorators to deployment
• Exploring the TurboGears toolbox
• Ensuring security and managing user access permissions in TurboGears applications

 

Table of Contents

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 Controller Technologies

Chapter 17: CherryPy and TurboGears Decorators  335

Chapter 18: TurboGears Deployment  355

 

Part VII: TurboGears Extras Chapter 19 The TurboGears Toolbox and Other Tools  371

Chapter 20: Internationalization  383

Chapter 21: Testing a TurboGears Application  397

Chapter 22: TurboGears Identity and Security  417

 

Part VIII: Appendix

Appendix: SQLAlchemy  431

 

Index  449

描述

“親愛的PHP，
我們之間結束了。你可以保留廚房水槽，但我要我的MVC。

有了TurboGears，我能夠擺脫最可怕的FileMaker Pro遺留“解決方案”。它基於經常變動的字段建立關係，導致“數據消失”。我用易於維護的TurboGears應用程序替換了它。清理和規範多年的混亂數據花了比開發TurboGears應用程序本身還要長的時間。TurboGears出色的工具和最佳實踐方法使快速構建應用程序變得如此容易。”
—Isaac Csandl，芝加哥法律搜索有限公司信息技術經理

“TurboGears為rPath節省了大量時間。在它發布之前，我們預計要花很多時間為我們的rPath Appliance Agent產品構建Web框架。TurboGears讓我們更專注於構建優質應用程序；它使我們能夠為客戶提供更多價值，而不是重新發明Web輪子。”
—Michael K. Johnson，rPath創始工程師和《Linux應用程序開發，第二版》合著者

“我認為這是Web框架的功能首次如此明顯。”
—Bruce Eckel，《Thinking in Java》和《Thinking in C++》作者

“TurboGears幫助我更快、更少頭痛地構建更複雜的Web應用程序，比我使用的任何其他框架都要好。就像Python本身一樣，它讓我在學習曲線最小的情況下更有生產力。”
—Quentin Hartman，系統管理員

“TurboGears改變了我開發Web應用程序的方式，從模型到視圖到控制器。多虧了TurboGears的強大功能，我能夠在我閒暇時間的一周內開發出WhatWhat的第一個版本。”
—Jonathan LaCour，Optio開發團隊負責人

“TurboGears通過實現基於Web的敏捷開發潛力，大大提高了我的生產力。”
—Brandon Goldfedder，Information Extraction and Transport（IET Inc.）工程副總裁，以及《The Joy of Patterns》作者

“TurboGears真正改變了我安排項目發布的方式：它使我能夠更快地交付並提供更好的質量，而不像以前使用GUI工具包時那樣。”
—J