I’ve been using Wingwares python IDE for Django development for almost 2 years. The Wingware IDE has been very good but I have had a few superficial annoyances with it so decided to look around and see what other IDE’s I could use. This led me to Eclipse. The first time I had a look around for Django IDE’s I remember looking at Eclipse but I think I recall difficulties when trying to run Django projects. Eclipse doesn’t natively support Django, you have to install Pydev to get that. After revisiting Eclipse and Pydev I can safely say I’ve switched from Wingware to Eclipse for Django development. The Eclipse IDE in itself is very good and full of useful development features. The Pydev plugin for it which allows python and Django development is also fantastic as it has a GUI for creating and managing Django specific python projects. Another great feature of Eclipse is it’s free price tag where as a single developer license for Wingware is $179 (roughly £115).

To get my Eclipse set up for Django I installed the following:

Then I read through and followed a few guides to understand Pydev and Django support:

In less than an hour I was up and running and fully understood how to start and develop Django projects in Eclipse. I’d even moved 3 existing Django projects into Eclipse in that time.

Sorry Wingware, you’ve been good to me but I’m trying Eclipse for a while and I don’t think I’m coming back.

I have been using a tool called Sphinx to help write some documentation recently. Writing documentation is boring, time consuming and rubbish. Sphinx doesn’t magically make all those problems go away but it is a great tool none the less.

• It has a nice fluid syntax which is near to how I’d normally jot down notes in notepad.
• It’s layered so that it separates the actual documentation files from the presentation of those files.
• Presentation can be in the form of a complete HTML web site or PDF (amongst others) and this is all done automatically for you.
• It allows for theming of the HTML output so you can integrate you’re documentation directly into your web site.
• Creation of contents tables, index pages and search area is all done, no effort required.

I’ve tried writing documentation both in a word document and as a HTML web page. Both methods are a nightmare to manage with infinite page long word documents and the constant need to write all the HTML tags/links for the web page method. I just want to write the words that make my documentation and that’s what Sphinx lets me do.

Now where can I get a GUI for it?