Appcelerator, Aptana & Pydev

Well, as publicized already, Aptana was acquired by Appcelerator (http://www.appcelerator.com/appcelerator-acquires-aptana/).

So, I thought I'd write a bit about it...

First thing to note is that (as the rest of the team) I've joined Appcelerator, and the plan is to keep Pydev going forward (as it has been going since I had joined Aptana). However, unlike the rest of the team, I'm still based on Brazil :)

I think that the only difference in focus is that now, aside from the support for Django and Google App Engine, Titanium (which is Appcelerator's platform for developing desktop and mobile applications) will also have some special attention, although I still don't have more details on what exactly this means...

All in all, I think this was a good thing, as one of the things that Aptana was looking for was something to support (as the plans were always about giving Aptana Studio for free and making money on something else), and Appcelerator will have a nice improvement in terms of a better coding environment :)

Pydev 1.6.4 released

Pydev 1.6.4 is now available.

The major change is the new unittest support, which was previously commented at: http://pydev.blogspot.com/2010/12/improved-unittest-support-in-pydev.html

Now, there were some other changes since that post that are worth mentioning too:

The default Pydev test runner can now distribute tests among multiple processes, which can make testing much faster (if you have multiple CPUs available). Although note that if the tests weren't properly designed they may break. One example would be the case when 2 tests end up writing/reading to the same file.

Note that there's also an option to run all the tests from a given module in the same process (instead of separating them 'randomly' among processes).

See: http://pydev.org/manual_adv_pyunit.html for details on the flags to be passed to enable running in multiple processes and basic instructions on how to use the new unittest integration.

Also important is that a major bug was fixed -- in this bug, existing interpreters could end up being corrupted when a new interpreter was added (so, if you are using multiple interpreters you're strongly advised to upgrade) -- note: if there seems to be some issue with corruption of the internal pydev indexes, ctrl+2 --reindex can be used (while in the pydev editor) to ask for the pydev indexes to be rebuilt (which would be the case if the globals browser is not working properly or the pydev code analysis was manually stopped for some reason) it shouldn't be needed, but, if the need arises, it's there :)

Improved unittest support in Pydev

Pydev 1.6.4 is still not released, but the first nightly with the new support for unittest is now available (see http://pydev.org/download.html on instructions for getting the nightly).

The major features added are:

1. A PyUnit view is now available to show the results of unittests
2. The nose and Py.test test runners are now also supported





The interesting features related to seeing the tests are:

- The results of tests are shown, along with a green/red bar (or if you're with Aptana Studio, following the color theme)
- The time a test took to run is shown (and may be used to sort the tree)
- The errors/output are shown by selecting the test run or just hovering over the items
- A filter to show only errors is available

And there are some interesting actions in that view too:

- A test session can be rerun
- A new test session can be created to rerun only the errors of the current run
- The test session can be stopped
- The results of a previously run test session can be seen again

And at last (but not least), the test runner can now be configured, so, one can use the test runner bundled in Pydev, Nose or Py.Test.

The preferences page to configure it can be accessed in the 'Configure test runner preferences' in the PyUnit view.





Enjoy!

What's next in pydev?

Ok, this release is taking more time than usual. What happened is that the main target of the release changed after I started working on it (due to popular demand).

So, the next 2 releases will be targeted at those that use unit-tests a lot -- such as myself :)

I won't put on more details right now, but as soon as things are ready for testing (probably at mid-end December) I'll post again about it.

In the meanwhile, critical bugfixes are being fixed and nightly builds are being issued with those fixes if anyone needs those. So, the current nightly is actually the last stable version + bugfixes -- new things are in a branch called 'nose' -- which should give a hint on what's being worked on from its name :)

Pydev 1.6.3 released

Yes, Pydev 1.6.3 is out.

This is mostly a bug fix release, but there are still some noteworthy things, such as new icons, a better editor preferences explaining how to properly configure the themes when using Aptana themes and an improved code-completion for keywords.

See the full details at http://pydev.org/

Enjoy!