Friday, March 20, 2009

First glance: SPE and TDD

SPE is a pretty nice python editor. I'm using Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex's default version (0.8.4) and have had pretty good results most of the time. It has nice features like functional auto-completion, file navigation, debugging, UML generation, session history, shell window, tab and syntax checking, etc. Many of these features, sadly, I don't really need. I probably need a bigger project so I can really appreciate the UML and documentation generators. In today's little app, it hardly matters.

Overall, it is a very reasonable full-featured editor for python programmers.

SPE 0.8.4 suffers from the same malady many of the others suffer from: no real support for TDD. I can switch to a script and run it with Ctrl-R (after making sure I do a save on each file that has changed).

I would like to see the next version contain a Save-All feature and a nosetests runner. It would be even cooler if the nosetests runner would fire up automagically after a save or save-all or else invoke save-all on the way to running the tests. That would be so sweet.

I would give a more thorough review, but I'm learning the pmock library while learning spe, and that's taking more time from actual programming than I'd like already.

No comments:

Post a Comment