The idea of Enamel started in late 2005 with the inception of the Slipgate group and the work we were doing at the time. Back then it was called Teleport and was in pretty closed development used only on the personal projects of Colin Alston. Interest in Teleport was reasonable but due to time constraints and the uncertainty of how the Nevow API would change in comming years made the project seem rather pointless. Teleport was demonstrated at TPA and it's use in a project to develop an investment portfolio management application. In 2006 Colin joined Thusa and began work there on distributed server management, and various bespoke tools for managing LDAP integrations. From the start the basis of these tools was the original code of Teleport. Permission was granted to back-contribute works relating to Nevow's usage - the LDAP authentication and other little tricks and boiler plate code which were inherent modifications to existing Nevow structures. This was stuffed into a generic package which was lazily named "Core". SQLAlchemy and a (then rather weak) wrapping for it was demonstrated at the 2006 Durban BarCamp which was sponsored in part by Thusa.

Enamel is thus a culmination and reworking of all the ideas that were learned from the development of Teleport and Core. It is our hope that Enamel might inspire more developers to accept Python, Twisted and Nevow as a valid platform and strong competitor in web application development, as well as empower people to gain the skills necessary for Python, Twisted and Nevow development.