War chest for writing web apps in Python?

[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.