embeddable ide?

[Neil Hodgson]

Stevek wrote:
> We're planning on making extensive use of Python to provide our users with a
> powerful scripting mechanism.  I've successfully embedded and extended
> Python but now I want to give the user a decent development environment for
> writing their scripts.

    The approach that is most likely to succeed is to take one of the 
current IDEs and reshape it to fit into your application. Full IDEs are 
quite complex beasts and so this will require quite a bit of effort and 
learning. Open source IDEs like PythonWin or Boa Constructor would be 
reasonable candidates although the commercial IDE vendors are also 
likely to be open to approaches. As Gerhard says a major criterion is 
that you should choose IDE code that uses the same UI toolkit as your 
application.

    Creating a Python IDE component would be a very interesting but 
difficult project. There are Visual Basic IDE components such as
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vba/default.asp
    An important issue in producing an IDE component is in defining a 
reasonable scope for the component so that it allows a great deal of 
flexibility but also allows the application to define limitations like 
source code being stored within the application's database rather than 
in files.

    Neil