My ToscaWidgets Experience

When I first heard about ToscaWidgets I was excited to say the least. Through the grape vine I heard that it was a new implementation of widgets based on the existing TurboGears widgets. I was immediately drawn to it. I was hoping that it would fix some of the quirks of TG widgets. Unfortunately I wasted quite a few hours and now I still have to roll back to the old TG widgets.

Tosca may be well designed. It may be better, smarter and faster that TG widgets, but much like counting the licks on a Tootsie pop-the world may never know. I blame a lack of real documentation and a lack of examples. I could not find one real example on using forms with TurboGears.

Since I have too many projects on my plate right now I cannot commit to writing a new widget system. I do think it is really needed. Hell…maybe I’ll put in a sleepless night or two to get it done. Either way, I want something with less configuration options and less features. I want dirt simple.

Do your experiences differ?

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August 26, 2007 | Filed Under turbogears 

Comments

  • Iain Duncan
    Same here. =(

    At the moment I'm not optimistic about the the move to toscawidgets and genshi for TG2. I'd sure like to use them, but the toscawidgets docs have not changed at all in a long time now.
  • I'm not sure that writing your own widget implementation is such a good idea. I totally agree with you about TW's documentation, but I think it would be less effort to dig through the code and write some documentation than to write your own from scratch.

    I'm saying this while in the same boat - with a need for better widgets and a lack of time. Writing your own widget framework will, I think, end up costing you more time.
  • Dave
    I took a look though--TW looks very nice but completely agree on the lack of docs. I won't have time over the next few months, but if no one's written any by then, maybe I'll have a chance.

    Either way, don't spend any sleepless nights creating yet another widget system: If you do have that time, it would be great to use it to document/improve TW...
  • I had the exact same experience :-(

    I had wanted to try out using ToscaWidgets for a new project and also couldn't going past the trial and error stage of figuring it all out since documentation is lacking. I can make sites pretty effectively with TurboGears and consider myself a decent python guy - but I'm not good enough to be able to dig through all the internals of ToscaWidgets to figure out how to effectively use it. Oh well, maybe next time.
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