ActiveState Blog

2 Days Left to Save $50 on Komodo

Sheila Rebellato — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:53:12 +0000

Just a friendly reminder that there’s only two days left to save $50 on new and upgrade purchases of Komodo IDE!

Do you have Komodo IDE 4? Now’s your chance to upgrade: After October 31/09, upgrades from Komodo 4 -> 5 will never be less than $145 US:
Upgrade today for $95 US!

Just trying Komodo IDE out on a trial basis, or using Komodo Edit? You too can save $50 when you purchase a brand-new Komodo IDE 5.2. Regularly $295:
Buy a new Komodo IDE today for $245 US.

Part of a small development team and want to get everyone on board with Komodo? Download the guide to Komodo IDE in the Enterprise (PDF) (read: Get Your Boss to Buy tips!) and save even more this month. Regularly Komodo 5-packs are $1180 US (that’s like buying four and getting one free!)
Komodo IDE 5-packs on sale for only $995 US.

We hope you take advantage of these awesome savings!

Hacking Komodo for Drupal development

jeffg — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 10:04:39 +0000

Today I gave a quick talk at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit, ostensibly called ‘Hacking Komodo for Drupal development’. A better ( but less interesting? ) title might have been “here are a bunch of ways you can extend Komodo easily, with Drupal-centric examples”. I’ve attached a PDF of the slides and a zip files of the samples I showed.

As well, I just published a Drupal extension for Komodo ( well, the start of one ) on the ActiveState community site:

http://community.activestate.com/xpi/drupal-extension-komodo

Update: at Jared’s request, here is the color scheme I’m using.

Workspace Beta: Project URL changes and SVN

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:11:26 +0000

Workspace Beta: Project URL changes and SVN:
Recent changes in Workspace infrastructure have had some unintended effects for users with project repositories checked out before Sept. 28th. If you’re the owner of one or more projects, it’s likely that your local working copies will need to be updated if you created projects prior to this date.

Workspace projects used to have URLs that looked like this:
http://workspace.activestate.com/projects/sandbox

The SVN repository URLs of these projects looked like this:
http://workspace.activestate.com/svn/sandbox

Now, projects have “namespaced” URLs to allow different users to have projects with the same name (think “MyProject”, “test”, “Website” etc.). The new project URLs look like this:
http://workspace.activestate.com/troyt/sandbox/

… with associated SVN URLs of:
http://svn.workspace.activestate.com/troyt/sandbox/

We had intended that the URLs of projects created before this change would continue to work normally and interchangeably with the new project locations. In fact this did work until recent changes to how we load balance Workspace broke these redirects. We were faced with a conundrum: without the load balancer, we can’t scale Workspace effectively; with it, we can’t handle the old SVN URLs.

Unfortunately, this means users of projects created before Sept. 28th will have to switch to using the new URLs.
Fortunately, this isn’t that difficult. It should be as easy as running the ’svn switch’ command. For example, for a checkout of the Sandbox project shown above, you would ‘cd’ to the root directory of your local working copy and run:

$ svn switch –relocate http://workspace.activestate.com/svn/sandbox http://svn.workspace.activestate.com/troyt/sandbox

This will update the local working copy to mirror the new URL.Subsequent svn commands should work normally.

The checkout command shown on the project’s “Source->Checkout” page displays the correct, new URL.

We’d like to apologize to those users who have run into this problem, and reassure everyone that we will do everything we can to minimize disruptions

like this in future. We feel that the changes have helped make Workspace faster, more robust and more stable than it was when we started the Beta, nd we hope to continue this trend.

Keep up-to-date with all of the changes in Workspace Beta with our Workspace Beta blog.

PyPM: A package manager for Python

troyt — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:36:57 +0000

Package managers are useful things. For language distributions, they simplify the job of finding and installing modules, libraries or extensions for that language.

ActivePerl has had ppm for years, and indeed it’s one of the big advantages of using ActivePerl over other Perl distributions. ActiveTcl got teacup a couple of years ago, which has allowed us to distribute a much “leaner” ActiveTcl 8.5, because users can easily install the extensions they need. Now ActivePython has its very own package manager: PyPM.

Python has had easy_install for a number of years, and more recently pip. These could be compared to Perl’s CPAN shell, but like the CPAN shell they need to build the packages that are downloaded from the Python Package Index (PyPI). If you don’t have a compiler installed and configured (i.e. most Windows systems), you can only build pure Python packages. Failing that, you can always search the web for a binary installer for your platform and Python version… somewhere… maybe…

ActivePython 2.6.3.7 contains the first beta release of PyPM and the repository already has thousands of packages for Python 2.6. You can install these packages using the same command on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

There’s a tutorial to get you started, and a list of packages currently available in the repository.

PyPM is following PEP 376 as it evolves to ensure you can using PyPM, pip and easy_install interchangeably without conflicts. We’ve also made sure it works with virtualenv.

We plan to add a GUI, keep adding packages from PyPI, and generally improve PyPM. So, give it a spin and be sure to let us know what you think!

Speaking at Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit

jeffg — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:40:45 +0000

I’m very excited about attending and speaking at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit weekend after next in Seattle, particularly because I get to talk about using Komodo for Drupal development, something near and dear to my heart.

My talk isn’t just a plug for Komodo though, instead I’ll be delving into all the ways you can hack Komodo to make working with Drupal and other frameworks easier and more productive.

Take a Survey – Win a T-shirt

Liliya — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:52:45 +0000

How about a t-shirt and a $50 credit for our online store?

In an effort to understand our community better and to deliver news and info that is relevant to you, we will be conducting a few surveys over the next few newsletter issues. These are quick, multiple-choice questions that should take between 5 to 10 minutes to complete. We will be grateful for your insights! 5 lucky participants will be randomly selected to receive an ActiveState t-shirt and a certificate to use on any of our products. So take the survey today for your chance to win!

Thanks everyone! Your insights are invaluable.

Take survey here:

https://app.e2ma.net/app2/survey/24563/14396/84a2f99497/

Mercurial support in Workspace

troyt — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:27:43 +0000

There’s been a lot of development going on in Workspace. We’ve recently added the Mercurial (hg) support our users have been asking for. Workspace users now have a choice between distributed and centralized source control management tools.

We asked Shane Caraveo — Lead Developer and Product Manager, Developer Services — some questions about these recent developments, and posted the results on the new Workspace blog.

Another cool Drupal / Komodo post

jeffg — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:02:30 +0000

Fast on the heels of last week’s Komodo / Acquia stack post by Robert Douglass, I just noticed a neat tip from Kevin Bridges on hooking up api.drupal.org in Komodo to do automatic lookups of the Drupal api docs based on your current selection:

http://kevinbridges.org/node/182

Komodo Sale Through October 31, 2009

Sheila Rebellato — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:33:27 +0000

Everyone saves $50 until the end of October!

Do you have Komodo IDE 4 but you’ve been waiting for Komodo IDE upgrades to go on sale again before purchasing? Now’s your chance to upgrade: After October 31/09, upgrades from Komodo 4 -> 5 will never be less than $145 US; upgrade today for $95 US!

Just trying Komodo IDE out on a trial basis, or using Komodo Edit? You too can save $50 when you purchase a brand-new Komodo IDE 5.2. Regularly $295, buy today for $245 US.

Part of a small development team and want to get everyone on board with Komodo? Download the guide to Komodo IDE in the Enterprise (PDF) (read: Get Your Boss to Buy tips!) and save even more this month. Regularly Komodo 5-packs are $1180 US (that’s like buying four and getting one free!) but… Until October 31/09, Komodo IDE 5-packs cost only $995 US.

Debugging with Komodo and the Acquia stack

jeffg — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:04:23 +0000

Robert Douglass, pre-eminent Drupal hacker and author, has a really nice blog post on the Acquia site about setting up Komodo IDE, Xdebug and their Acquia Drupal Stack Installer:

http://acquia.com/blog/xdebug-komodo-and-acquia-drupal-stack-installer

I recently moved to running everything out of MacPorts instead of MAMP, but I do like how Acquia has packaged up a nice simple stack for people to get going on Drupal development.

I’ve been using OS X as my primary dev platform at work for 2 1/2 years, ever since I got an iMac. I have to say the LAMP development picture has gotten a lot rosier since 10.4 days. I’ll shortly be moving back to Linux though, once my new monster dev machine arrives.