Luke (of Moksha fame) has been guiding me through the "official" and correct way to do real-time web with TurboGears.  Orbited seems to be a given, but STOMP apparently doesn't scale, while AMQP isn't well supported under Javascript.  That seems to leave XMPP as the likely "official" way until AMQP is fully supported.

Of course, you need an XMPP server to do anything with XMPP, so I'm entering the maze of twisty-turny passages that is configuring EJabberD to connect to our TurboGears database for authentication.  I figure I'll wind up with an external auth script for EJabberD which uses TurboGears command-line configuration to get the DB connection and use the standard friendly-form login table for authentication.  Alternately I could go "wrong school" and just use an RPC call into a TG controller to do the auth, or maybe I could just use a "quick and light" XMPP server for the tutorial and let people struggle with EJabberD themselves (naw, that's not helpful).

However, today, before I get on the plane, I want to release PyOpenGL 3.0.1 final, so robust real-time web-apps for TurboGears are going to remain undocumented for now.