Rapid Web Applications With TurboGears is now shipping

As I’ve said before, we are building our prototype using the TurboGears Web Application framework. Kevin Dangoor (the leader of the project), Mark Ramm and Gigi Sayfan have just released the first book about this great framework. It is currently the #20 tech book on Amazon. In addition to the paper copy, a Rough Cuts PDF version is available over at Safari Books and this is the version I have been using.

Documentation has always been TG’s biggest weakness and I believe it has hampered its growth. With this book and the current big push by the community to get all the docs in order, that criticism will soon go away. If you are a fan of rapid development for web applications, you should check out turbogears.org and consider purchasing the book.

Our alpha will be delivered early next week which really is a strong reminder of developer productivity using TG. The next step is to try to deploy it on WebFaction who are our hosts for the prototype phase. Whilst they offer one-click install of TG (and Django, Rails, WordPress etc), it is of an older version and we haven’t got the current TG release running there yet.

We also got our Amazon EC2 account but it’s unlikely I’ll have the time to deploy on that to see how it works in the short term. As Argolon readers know, I’m a virtualization fanatic and have been a VMWare fan-boy for a very long time (since the original Workstation beta in 1999). EC2 uses Xen, a far less mature product but one with great potential. I think it is still too early to consider using EC2 for our full launch but I find the concept of dynamically adding and removing nodes based on load to be absolutely compelling.