War chest for writing web apps in Python?

[Vincent Delporte]

Hello

I'm thinking of using Python to build the prototype for a business web
appplication. The development and test machine is XP, while ultimate
deployment will be on a shared Unix web host.

What would you recommend I get, besides the Python engine itself? Good
IDE (Kodomo?) ? Some kind of GUI designer? Add-on's? Other tools?

Thank you.

[faulkner]

cygwin
http://www.cygwin.com/
try a few IDEs out to see which fits you best. IDLE ships with python,
and isn't significantly objectively worse than any other python IDE,
afaik.
GUI designers aren't necessary because there's usually so little
boilerplate code in any python toolkit, but, again, whatever works best
for you.
[wait, will you be running a GUI on a webhost?]
if you haven't selected a web framework, may i steer you towards
cherrypy? it stays out of your way more than any other web framework
i've tried. and i'm using it now to build a databased web-app for my
college.
http://www.cherrypy.org/
Vincent Delporte wrote:

Hello

I'm thinking of using Python to build the prototype for a business web
appplication. The development and test machine is XP, while ultimate
deployment will be on a shared Unix web host.

What would you recommend I get, besides the Python engine itself? Good
IDE (Kodomo?) ? Some kind of GUI designer? Add-on's? Other tools?

Thank you.

[Mr BigSmoke]

For IDEs i recommend Wing IDE (its really good but comercial.. :( ),
pydev for eclipse and also SPE.

For GUI designer... it depends of wich kind of app u'll develop.

For web apps try cherrypy.. it's wonderfull and simple... U can also
try zope and plone (the they are less simple....)

cheers

Fabio


Vincent Delporte wrote:

Hello

I'm thinking of using Python to build the prototype for a business web
appplication. The development and test machine is XP, while ultimate
deployment will be on a shared Unix web host.

What would you recommend I get, besides the Python engine itself? Good
IDE (Kodomo?) ? Some kind of GUI designer? Add-on's? Other tools?

Thank you.

[Dan Sommers]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 10:22:55 +0200,
Sybren Stuvel <sy*******@YOUR thirdtower.com. imaginationwrot e:

Vincent Delporte enlightened us with:

>The development and test machine is XP, while ultimate deployment
will be on a shared Unix web host.

That's just begging for huge problems. No insult intended, but it's
downright stupid to develop and test on one platform, and then deploy
on another. Every system nowadays is a Unix, except Windows. I suggest
you pick another system for development and testing.

We just did that at work (developed on the corporate-issued non-Unix
computers and then deployed on a Linux box), and had no problems at all.
In a former life, I was a long-time embedded system developer, where we
*always* developed on one platform and deployed on another. My
experience with developing on your deployment platform is that it's too
easy for platform dependencies to sneak in without being caught.

Regards,
Dan

--
Dan Sommers
<http://www.tombstoneze ro.net/dan/>
"I wish people would die in alphabetical order." -- My wife, the genealogist

[Kjell Magne Fauske]

Django(http://www.djangoproject.com/) is a nice Python based framework
for writing web applications. It comes bundled with a simple web server
that is usefull for local developing. A desciption on how to install
Django on windows can be found at
http://effbot.org/zone/django.htm#installing
- Kjell Magne
Vincent Delporte wrote:

Hello

I'm thinking of using Python to build the prototype for a business web
appplication. The development and test machine is XP, while ultimate
deployment will be on a shared Unix web host.

What would you recommend I get, besides the Python engine itself? Good
IDE (Kodomo?) ? Some kind of GUI designer? Add-on's? Other tools?

Thank you.

[Nick Vatamaniuc]

Vincent,

If you plant to deploy on Unix/Linux, why develop on Windows? I would
suggest to make a partition on your Windows machine and install some
popular Linux distribution (I use Ubuntu but there are others too.)

The biggest benefit will come from the fact that you will have access
to a large pre-packaged set of IDEs, utilities, libraries, python
modules, all kinds of Apache modules and so on. Mind you, there are
probably more Python IDEs and tools that work better(natively ) in Linux
than in Windows (ipython and Eric3 are the ones that come to mind).
This way you can quickly try various IDEs and tools for a couple of
days to find what you like, just do 'apt-get install <my_new_ide>' (for
Debian based distros like Debian and Ubuntu that is) and your new IDE
will appear in the Programming menu.

As far as a specific IDE, I already mentioned Eric3, I think it is the
most polished one. I have tried Komodo, SPE, pydev and Emacs. I have
settled on Eric3 and sometimes I use Emacs (please don't start editor
wars over this, these are just my personal views!). I found Komodo to
be too slow on my machine, SPE was also slow, was crashing on me and
had strange gui issues, pydev works with Eclipse so you have to
install that too, also found it to have quite a few rough edges. Emacs
is actaully pretty good if you got used to the keys, but lacks basic
refactoring and other small helper tools that IDEs have. Also I
found ipython to be a very useful replacement for the standard Python
prompt.

Not sure what kind of a GUI designer you would want for a web based
application. Or is it for an administration module with a gui? In that
case you'll first have to choose the GUI toolkit. The default one that
comes with Python is Tk (Tkinter) and there are others like wxPython,
PyGTK, PyQT and so on. In general though, the time spent learning how
to design a gui with a designer could probably be used to just write
the code yourself in Python (now for Java or C++ it is a different
story... -- you can start a war over this ;-)

Hope this helps,
Nick Vatamaniuc


Vincent Delporte wrote:

Hello

I'm thinking of using Python to build the prototype for a business web
appplication. The development and test machine is XP, while ultimate
deployment will be on a shared Unix web host.

What would you recommend I get, besides the Python engine itself? Good
IDE (Kodomo?) ? Some kind of GUI designer? Add-on's? Other tools?

Thank you.

[Vincent Delporte]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:06:10 +0200, Vincent Delporte
<ju*****@acme.c omwrote:
(snip)

Thanks everyone for the input!

For the IDE: Ideally, I'd like something modern that uses language
wordlists (to show syntax, variables, etc. in different colors), a
window that lists all the procedures so I can easily jump from on to
the other, possibly an edit window that can fold code with the
familiar + sign in the left side, etc. I'll check out WingIDE and
Eric3.

For the GUI builder: It's just that I'm used to Delphi, ie. drawing
the interface with a mouse, but I guess the equivalent is just a
WYSIWYG HTML editor like DreamWeaver etc.

For the application engine: Indeed, I hesitate between CherryPy and
Django, as I've read a lot of nice things about both.

Hopefully, finding web hosters that support Python and those
frameworks won't be an issue?

Thanks.

[Dan Sommers]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 13:03:25 +0200,
Sybren Stuvel <sy*******@YOUR thirdtower.com. imaginationwrot e:

Dan Sommers enlightened us with:

>We just did that at work (developed on the corporate-issued non-Unix
computers and then deployed on a Linux box), and had no problems at
all. In a former life, I was a long-time embedded system developer,
where we *always* developed on one platform and deployed on another.
My experience with developing on your deployment platform is that
it's too easy for platform dependencies to sneak in without being
caught.

I agree with you there. My bet is that you also *tested* on the
deployment platform, though.

You win that bet. (We actually tested on both platforms.) *Not*
testing on the deployment platform is *definitely* asking for trouble.

Regards,
Dan

--
Dan Sommers
<http://www.tombstoneze ro.net/dan/>
"I wish people would die in alphabetical order." -- My wife, the genealogist

[Rob Sinclar]

I'm thinking of using Python to build the prototype for a business web

appplication. The development and test machine is XP, while ultimate
deployment will be on a shared Unix web host.

What would you recommend I get, besides the Python engine itself? Good
IDE (Kodomo?) ? Some kind of GUI designer? Add-on's? Other tools?

Thank you.

If you plant to deploy on Unix/Linux, why develop on Windows?

Because it's worth it. And faster. Read below.

just do 'apt-get install <my_new_ide>' (for
Debian based distros like Debian and Ubuntu that is) and your new IDE
will appear in the Programming menu.

Nah I prefer to search half an hour on google, download an exe-installer
for which I'll never see what it does or contain, double clic on it to launch
installation procedure, clic 15 times on "ok" and I'm done.
On the other hand aptitude is the worst thing ever for dependencies and
that kind of stuff.

Best Regards,
Rob

[Vincent Delporte]

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:33:00 GMT, Dennis Lee Bieber
<wl*****@ix.net com.comwrote:

>Well, syntax color coding, and block folding are supported by
PythonWin (comes with the ActiveState Windows install) and SciTE.

The structural browser isn't as easy...

Thanks for the input.