[Zope] Best development tools and methods for Zope development?

[Heimo Laukkanen]

Hi ya all,

since it is a new year, I would like to start 2004 by doing a little 
survey with people about development tools and methods people actively 
use. You can either reply privately or publicly and I will collect the 
answers and produce a report about it. Please answer the questions below 
before 17 th January and everyone can soon benefit from the shared 
knowledge.

Below are also my answers as examples.

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1. Zope and Python versions currently used in production?

Zope 2.6.2 and Python 2.2.3. I'm currently testing 2.7b3

2. CMF / Plone versions in production

CMF1.3.2, Plone 1.0.5

Now moving into 1.4.2 and Plone 2 from CVS on new projects.

3. Development and production platforms?

Windows as the desktop/frontend machine and Linux running Zope and other 
backend software. As a linux distribution I use either fedora core or 
older redhat versions.

4. Editors, IDEs used?

WingIDE as IDE. I am a new user to WingIDE - but very impressed with it's 
functionalities like autocompletion of functions, the possibility to jump 
into function definitions from code, browse source and naturally debug 
Zope.

I loved to use Eclipse for it's great CVS integration and otherwise great 
UI - but there really is no real integration of Python into Eclipse. 
Trustudio python plugin brings in syntax highlighting and that is it.

Komodo I used before because I liked it's UI. Have never used Emac's 
Python module.

5. Zope installations ( Zeo? Instance home? ), ZODB ( FileStorage, 
DirectoryStorage, APE?), RDBMS

Zeo on larger production setups, instance home used on all instances - in 
development and in production.

I use mostly use Filsetorage as the ZODB, though I have done some tests 
with APE and keep a close eye on it in the future. I'm extremely 
interested on the possibility to store objects in relational databases.

PostgreSQL as RDBMS, using Psycopg as the adapter.

6. Sourcecode-control( CVS, Subversion? ), clients used

CVS. TortoiseCVS and/or WinCVS.

WinCVS UI is terrible and I would like to get a better tool for doing 
diffs and getting older revisions etc. from CVS. I don't like command line 
CVS since I was totally spoiled with Eclipse's extremely nice CVS 
integration.

7. How to do debugging?

I've been using Python debugger on hard problems, otherwise I've usually 
just printed out to log or to screen debugging information. I will start 
to use now more WingIDE's debugger.

Haven't used python debugger on Zeo installation, nor have I used the 
zctl-script

8. Profiling, tuning and improving performance?

CallProfiler and PT_Profiler as profiling tools.

Apache's ab as a tool to create load while testing performance.

On production servers I keep Zope atleast behind Apache - possibly Squid 
and Apache if caching is needed. With Apache I use proxypass, not 
rewrite-rules.


9. Notes about development

I keep as much as possible on the filesystem, so that it can be put into 
versioning system. On Plone sites I try to create customization policies 
so that properties of the site are also kept in the code format.

This makes it also easier to keep development instances and production 
instances in sync.

Archetypes is naturally beloved too and used as a base, when creating new 
content types.


10. Anything else?

-- 
-huima