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O’Reilly Network: Komodo and Pygame Go 1.0

“ActiveState recently released Komodo 1.0, an IDE for Python and
Perl written for Mozilla. You will need a fast system with 128
megabytes of RAM or more to run Komodo. Actually, based on comments
from others and my own experience with Mozilla, you might want
about twice that much RAM. Komodo is released under a dual license,
one for commercial developers and one for non-commercial
developers. To get a license you must subscribe to the ActiveState
Programmer Network (ASPN). In order of increasing cost and
privilege, you may get an Open, Komodo, or Perl subscription. A
Python subscription is still in the works. The Perl subscription
gives you access to O’Reilly’s Perl books among other things. I
guess that the Python subscription will give you something similar.
ActiveState has reworked their web site as a part of the new
subscription offerings. Don’t be surprised when it looks different
than you remembered.”

“Some people have told me they like Komodo, others that it is
slow. The benefit most seem to agree upon is that you can learn
just one IDE and use it for both Perl and Python. If you use a lot
of regular expressions you are sure to appreciate the Rx Toolkit
and Library, tools to help you build, test and debug your trickier
regular expressions. I haven’t tried it because I have a slow
connection and a mere 64 megabytes of RAM on my system. Until I get
a nice windfall, I will probably stick to Vim.”

“Something I am playing with now, however, is Pygame. Pete
Shinners announced the 1.0 release of Pygame last week. Pygame
wraps Sam Lantinga’s Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library, giving
it a nice Python interface. SDL is an open source, cross-platform
multimedia library covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License
(LGPL.) Loki Entertainment Software uses SDL to port popular games
to the Linux system. Because SDL is a cross platform toolkit,
Python/SDL games written with Pygame should be able to run on a Mac
or Windows system as easily as they would on a Linux
system.


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