Winpdb - A Platform Independent Python Debugger Quiet
It has been rather quiet lately with Winpdb. I have been gradually getting less and less feedback, bug reports and requests either here or in the sourceforge pages. Since it is being downloaded as usual I can only assume it is a sign of maturity. Maybe it just works.
On the other hand I have been contemplating lately the social phenomena of user community indifference. A piece of software can have tens of thousands of users and still generate negligible collaboration activity. It is a mystery. I mean, given this behavior what makes the Wikipedia concept work? What makes one project a collaboration party and another a single person effort?
In any case, this silence on the Python desktop front coincides with my personal shift into the grazing grounds of web development. Finally. Probably one of the last in the herd of software developers, late to get out of bed as usual, I lifted my head from the desktop grass and started marching in search of some XHTML. The first pasture I found by recommendation was of Ruby and RoR. I found the grass over there totally indigestible. Every one says how wonderful and natural it is and that Ruby is actually a lost twin sister of Python. Sorry, but I could see no resemblance what so ever. Sure, Python is not a perfect language but the beautiful thing about it is that it magically disappears and quickly becomes second nature, an extension of your brain. Trying to program in Ruby felt like eating lunch full of sand. I therefore marched on and this time I decided to start from the basics with PHP, XHTML, CSS, SQL, JavaScript, AJAX etc… PHP is another curiosity. It is the most terrible language I ever stumbled upon. How it has become such a corner stone of web development is a mystery. But I decided to give it a serious try this time. After all, the other grazers on that pasture told me PHP programmers are in high demand.
To get PHP, SQL, and the rest into my system I am writing a small and simple MVC framework from scratch. It is called Bolepo and I will soon put it online. Probably in this website initially until it starts crying that it wants its own space. It already has a cute and useful ORM library. I swear.
Well I’d like to thank you for Winpb - Its a great debugger! - I use it to debug my Django apps
We have the completly same opinion about PHP and Ruby. I did try to work with PHP too, but in the end i realized what a complete idiot i was for using that thing when i already knew one of the greatest languages for web development: Python … now i use the magical Pylons framework and i mourn the months wasted on php.
Yes, I really appreciate the debugger! It’s a great tool!!! Very easy to use.
I’ve done some PHP too, but have recently picked up Python and I’m looking to use CherryPy. Any thoughts or suggestions?
I’m basically looking to use CherryPy to implement a web service front-end to my python code/classes.
On the PHP side, you may want to have a look at the Zend Framework. It’s not just MVC, but includes other useful modules you can leverage.
If you run the latest version of PHP (currently 5.2.6), you can actually do some pretty cool, standard type of object-oriented patterns with it (using interfaces, etc.), but I’ve certainly found it lacking in some areas.
Thanks again for sharing, -e
Hi Eric,
I don’t know CherryPy but I have tried Django and liked a lot what I saw. It is simple, quick and fun to learn and just feels right.
Still I am going after PHP for educational reasons. It impressed me as the Latin of the web development world.
Thanks for the tip about the Zend framework. I will give it a read and also to Symfony and Drupal.
Yea, maybe Winpdb just works. (at least for me
)
CherryPy and Django are two different things. Django is a complete WebFramework with templating, orm, auth and admin stuff.
CherryPy is (only) a straightforward HTTP Server where you have to decide yourself how to produce your pages - from whatever data backend.
CherryPy Stuff:
http://digitale.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/content/overview
(only in german, sorry)
We’ve used winpdb quite a bit with our project.
We first found it when we were trying to debug why an FCGI kept crashing. It turns out an upstream library was slowly leaking threads — and would eventually exceed the limit and crash. This would have been very difficult to track down without winpdb’s ability to attach to and debug a daemon process.
Lately I’ve mainly been using it for inspecting the internals of our desktop UI (we ship builds for Linux, Mac, and Windows) and winpdb has greatly improved the process.
My apologies for withholding feedback until the present. My guess is winpdb’s happy users represent a silent majority. In any case, thanks for the great tool.
Hi, I have been using winpdb for about a year or two and it’s great. I do have a few feature requests, however.
* Add watch windows on variables or expressions like in other debuggers
* When a variable’s value changes from the last time it was displayed, it should be highlighted in red. Makes it easier to see what has changed as you step through the source.
thanks!
michael
Great application. Installed it yesterday and got it running in minutes. I was debugging some threading issues in Pyro with Eclipse in vain. I found the problem in minutes with Winpdb. Thanks for a great tool.