Daniel Nouri's Old Blog

I never leave home without these, at least not when I leave home to do development:

• Emacs

  Emacs of course isn't specific to Zope or Python. Nevertheless, Emacs is the editor for doing Zope development. Check out Philipp von Weitershausen demo pdbtrack. You need nothing more than the usual python-mode for this. (If you don't know what pdb is, read this gentle intro to debugging in Python.)

  I hear that other editors can do this too, but it can't possibly work as well. :-P

  Start with Emacs basics right now!

• Firebug

  You've certainly been living under a rock if you haven't heard of Firebug before. Never was trying out and debugging JavaScript so joyful. Firebug has an interactive JavaScript shell that since version 1.0 also has access to the variables in the scope of any breakpoint that you might have set.

• PDBDebugMode

  What it does: It loads the Python Debugger (pdb) whenever Zope encounters an exception that was not filtered in the error_log. In combination with pdbtrack this means: Don't read tracebacks to find out where the exception has occurred and where you might want to hook in to debug. And don't restart after you figured out where to put that pdb.set_trace(). Instead: Have your pdb point to the failing line of code and do your debugging right away. Works similar to --debug-inplace of the Zope testrunner.

  This might be not as useful for development of new applications (think tests) as for situations where you have to debug something quickly, possibly on a live deployment.

• ScriptDebugging

  Before, I totally hated debugging code in Script (Python) objects. That was until I found Lennart Regebro's ScriptDebugging, which helps pdbtrack find out where in the script you are, which means that you can debug scripts just like any other Python code.

• DeadlockDebugger

  Stuck with a Zope that's stuck? If your Zope stops responding, use DeadlockDebugger to find out where exactly Zope's threads are deadlocked. From the author:

  This product adds a hook so that a deadlocked Zope process can be debugged, by dumping a traceback of all running python processes. The dump is sent to the event log (at the DEBUG level) and returned to the browser (even though the Zope is deadlocked and doesn't answer any other requests!).

  DeadlockDebugger can of course also be used to debug Zope in non-deadlock situations, when a Zope process is taking a long time and you wish to know what code is being executed.

What's the Zope 2 tool that you'd take with you on an island?