TurboGears is not a Rails clone

Uchi Ogbuji spotted a Slashdot comment by Ian Bicking explaining why TurboGears is not a Rails clone. I don’t think I’ve come out and said it, but what Ian said sums things up quite well. TurboGears is every bit as compelling as Rails, but it’s not a clone. It’s built as an integration of preexisting components, to give you the full front-to-back development stack. We have lots of good tools and ideas to choose from and Rails is not the only idea well from which we’ll be drinking.

Though the parts of TurboGears are not clones of Rails features, David Heinemeier Hansson deserves huge credit for showing what a full stack web application framework could look like at a time when most tools, open source ones in particular, were designed to tackle only one piece of the puzzle.