“ActiveState Tool Corp., an O’Reilly affiliate, is building two
integrated development environments (IDEs) for scripting languages
with full initial support for Perl and Python, the company
announced [May 24, 2000]. The first IDE, called Komodo, uses the
Mozilla application framework and is cross-platform. Mozilla, an
open source software project, provides Internet client software
that includes a browser, mail and news functionality, and a toolkit
for developing Web-based applications. Mozilla’s code, designed for
performance and portability and featuring industry-leading
standards support, has generated substantial interest in the open
source community. The second IDE plugs Visual Perl and Visual
Python into Microsoft’s Visual Studio 7.0 framework and gives
Visual Studio developers easy integration with their existing
tools.”
“The new ActiveState IDEs will offer features familiar to users
of other IDEs. These include an editor that supports
language-specific syntax coloring, language-sensitive tool tips,
smart indentation control, parenthesis matching, integrated error
highlighting, and context-sensitive integrated help. An interactive
debugger will let programmers walk through their code, setting
breakpoints and viewing the contents of variables. Many scripting
language programs are still debugged by embedding debug, time
print-type statements in the code. ActiveState’s IDEs will save
programmers this hassle.”
“ActiveState is designing the IDEs so they can be easily
modified and expanded upon by the programmer. The Mozilla IDE
source code will be visible and will use standards such as XML,
CSS, RDF, FTP, WebDAV, and HTTP. “This will make it easy for users
to extend the IDE as well as learn how a complex Mozilla
application is built,” Hardt says. “Since we’re targeting
people who write scripts, we envision that many of them will create
extensions to the IDE that will be shared with the
community.”