Spyced

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g

Earlier, I wrote about how ORM developers shouldn't try to re-invent SQL . It doesn't need to be done, and you're not likely to end up with an actual improvement. SQL may be designed by committee, but it's also been refined from thousands if not millions of man-years of database experience. The same applies to DDL. (Data Definition Langage -- the part of the SQL standard that deals with CREATE and ALTER.) Unfortunately, a number of Python ORMs are trying to replace DDL with a homegrown Python API. This is a Bad Thing. There are at least four reasons why: Standards compliance Completeness Maintainability Beauty Standards compliance SQL DDL is a standard. That means if you want something more sophisticated than Emacs, you can choose any of half a dozen modeling tools like ERwin or ER/Studio to generate and edit your DDL. The Python data definition APIs, by contrast, aren't even compatibile with other Python tools. You can't take a table definition