[Freecats-Dev] Free CATS TM server - Development tools

[Henri Chorand]

Hi all,

Here we go now.


PYTHON
------
Begin by downloading and installing Python 2.2.2 (latest stable release)
See at:
http://www.python.org/download/
and select your platform and O.S.
(Mac OS X & Darwin ports are at http://fink.sourceforge.net/)

Now, which tools do we use? Answer: any Python IDE (Integrated 
Development Environment). There are several good Python IDEs available 
around, most of which do not have a graphical GUI builder, but the 
latter is only necessary for our client modules.

For the server modules, a good start can be ScITE text editor, very 
simple to use and which has Python syntax highlighting, as well as 
Python interpretor. Windows & Linux only.
http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
I successfully installed it on my Linux Red Hat 8.0 despite a small 
glitch whith ScITE's author kindly helped to solve via Usenet 
(comp.lang.python). Let me know if you need my Linux setup notes.
That way, you can be running your first lines of code very quickly.

There are various other IDEs. Python comes with one called IDLE. See 
Python documentation in order to make it work - I have yet to discover 
how ;-))
(apparently I must also install Tkinter - I'll see about it later on).
Lucky Windows users can get going quickly with:
http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/idle_intro/indexfr.html


A very detailed list of IDEs (mostly commercial software) is available at:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/IntegratedDevelopmentEnvironments

If might be useful if we all select the same one, in order to help each 
other using it, but the only Mac stuff indicated is wxDesigner, a 
(probably very good) non-free software. Kirk, I'm sure you can find nice 
things at the above URL.

At a later stage, one of the only free ones is Eric3, at:
http://www.die-offenbachs.de/detlev/eric3.html
Note that it needs something called PyQt, at:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PyQt

When we'll begin to design graphical interfaces for GUI clients, a new 
project, Boa Constructor, seems very interesting:
http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/
(it needs wxPython, at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wxpython)


DOCUMENTATION
-------------
I found lots of great Python documentation.
http://www.python.org/doc/
Lots of stuff in French if you prefer, among which, for starters:

Cours de programmation Python, by Gérard Swinnen (Belgian Python fan)
http://www.ulg.ac.be/cifen/inforef/swi/python.htm

And a bit afterwards:
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/


Good luck to all who'll try!

Henri