The Python IDE consolidation effort [LWN.net]

A new Python IDE consolidation effort (PYxIDEs) is underway: "This project aims to connect open source projects concerning an IDE core library and framework written in Python to avoid the ongoing duplicating efforts."

The project launch statement (dated March 10, 2006) discusses the reasoning behind this effort: [Python IDEs] "Looking at IDE's I can have three observations: 1. For some reasons numerous users prefer to use an open source IDE. 2. For some reasons numerous python programmers like to develop an open source IDE. 3. For some reasons the open source python IDE developers are not collaborating at all. The reasons for 1 or 2 are obvious, at least to me. Recently I have been wondering about the reason for 3. (Probably a lot of python programmers have wondered about this already for ages, but ok I might be slow ;-) I came to the conclusion that there was NO reason."

Currently, there are 18 different IDEs that are participating in the project, some are for the Windows platform. Here is the list so far:

NewEdit IDE
scrIDE
Eric3 IDE
Leo IDE
ActiveGrid IDE
PIDA IDE
drPython IDE
pyDev IDE
PyCrust Shell
IPython Shell
WinPdb debugger
Extended Python Debugger
PyLint
Gaphor UML plugin
Envisage workbench
Dabo
SilverCity
SPE IDE

A number of wikis have been set up to discuss the various areas that the project aims to work on. The Not reinventing the wheel wiki is for discussion of which parts of existing IDEs should be reused. The Goals wiki covers the basic project goals, which include sharing of code, laziness, quality control, and other issues. The Architecture wiki will focus on the basic IDE structures such as the API Libraries, underlying framework, user interface and underlying data models. The Todo wiki is for discussions of work to be done, and the License wiki is for licensing discussions.

This seems like a fairly hefty list of goals to achieve, especially considering the number of developers involved. The focus of the project seems clear. The benefits of having more common code between IDEs, and possibly fewer IDEs would likely be a consolidation of effort, and faster development on the most popular designs.

In any case, this is an interesting effort. If it flies, it may be something that could be applied to other software genres that have a lot of duplication of effort. A Python GUI consolidation project comes to mind as one such effort.

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The Python IDE consolidation effort

Posted Mar 17, 2006 0:23 UTC (Fri) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

"Currently, there are 18 different IDEs that are participating in the project, some are for the Windows platform."

Ouch! Can you either put a semicolon between "project" and "some", or the words "of which" between "some" and "are for"? (Sorry - that's a particular bugbear of mine.)