The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Komodo anyone?

Has anyone here tried the Komodo IDE from ActiveState/SOPHOS? I'm downloading the Personal trial now, just to look it over. However, I'd applreciate (and love to hear) any opinions.

My main questions:

1. Is it worth the price, does it speed up coding?

2. How is it as an IDE? I love Visual Studios because it makes creating GUI's so much easier. How does Komodo handle GUI's?

Thanks!

Andrew Burton
Monday, April 5, 2004

I used Komodo for a while. The regular expressions debugger was nice and so was the syntax highlighting and automatic syntax checking, but really, once I discovered GVIM, I never looked back.

A madman, sitting in his basement, building a house of cards and deception.
Monday, April 5, 2004

I use the python editor and the xslt (yech!) debugger.

Haven't used the gui stuff.

fool for python
Monday, April 5, 2004

I use Komodo every day for Perl and PHP. I haven't tried loads of other IDEs, so I can't tell you how it stacks up against every competitor out there. For the languages I'm working in, I definitely think it speeds up development. As was mentioned earlier, the regular expression tester/toolkit utility is very nice. You will find little foibles with the software. For example, sometimes the "code folder" gets confused after you put braces in the wrong place, and can't collapse a procedure completely. Sometimes the debugger will run right past a breakpoint that you've set in the code. But overall, very good. (I'm running one version behind, so maybe these bugs have been patched in the latest release...)

Rob VH
Tuesday, April 6, 2004

I had Komodo at my last job. It's cool.

If you pay for ASPN or Komodo, uh, super ultamite edition, you can get the TCL Gui-builder toolkit, and you can create envent-driven perlTK programs.

Personally, I found it annoying - I could never get it to do what I wanted. Then again, I never read the manual, so it probably did cool stuff, I just didn't know how.

If you find yourself sticking lots of print statements in your perl apps, the IDE can help with debugging. Otherwise, it might not be worth the $$ ...

Matt H.
Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Are people serious about using Komodo for languages like Perl and PHP? I saw someone mentioning GUI apps and that might good ... I dunno as I don't do those. Emacs, TextPad ... I've never used more than these for Perl/PHP. Of course I use a framework (template::toolkit in perl and smarty or savant in PHP with objects and controllers for both), maybe that's a difference. Has anyone who is knows the langauge where you can just think and type 90% of the time, and is good with Emacs or Textpad so you write macros and stuff, have any of you then switched to some IDE?

Me
Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Like I said, I was using Komodo, now I'm using vi.

I don't see enough difference to push my management to buy it now.

Matt H.
Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Thanks, everyone, for the advice and experience. It's appreciated.

Me: Well, I use vi or Notepad for 99% of my Perl, PHP, and Python work -- 1% for those obfuscated commandline deals. I asked because while I was programming a little GUI app the other day in Perl, and look into the same with Python, find myself wondering if there's any kind of drag'n'drop IDE for the P-languages, as there is for VBScript and C# (WebMatrix, Visual Studios, FrontPage, Borland C#Builder, etc.).

Andrew Burton
Tuesday, April 6, 2004