Newbie advice

[CSharpner]

On Oct 29, 4:25 am, "Diez B. Roggisch" <de... at nospam.web.de> wrote:
> CSharpner schrieb:
>
> > Alright, I'm not new to programming, but I'm diving in head first into
> > Python for the first time.  I'm running on Windows 7, just installed
> > "Eclipse Java EE IDE for Web Developers" and installed PyDev in it and
> > installed Python 2.6.  I've written my first "Hello World" program,
> > which simply displays "Hello World!" in the console output.
>
> > Here's what I /want/ to do, but don't know where to begin:
>
> > - Write web services in Python (I've done plenty of this in .NET,
> > BTW).
>
> This depends. If by "web services" you mean generally HTTP-based RPC,
> such as JSON or XMLRPC - yes. If you talk about offering a SOAP-server,
> then Python is rather painful in that respect. Which partially is his
> (or his 3rd-party-libs) fault, but IMHO mostly because that whole
> standard is as crappy as it can get, and my personal experience told me
> to not expect interoperability from it anyway.
>
> > - Write plain DLLs (is that even an option in Python (I told you I was
> > a newb to Python, didn't I? :))
>
> There is elmer:http://elmer.sourceforge.net/
> And you can create COM servers with win32-extensions, and AFAIK
> IronPython allows you to create something like DLLs also.
>
> > - Write a web app (HTML front end, Python web services called from
> > JavaScript).
>
> Plenty of options here, popular choices of frameworks include Django,
> TurboGears 1 & 2, Pylons, werkzeug, web.py and some more.
>
> > - Write a plain old web app with Python (no web services or Ajax, just
> > plain HTML & Python).
>
> See above, just don't use AJAX....
>
> > - Is it possible to create a Windows client desktop GUI app with
> > Python?  How?  How 'bout a Linux GUI app?
>
> Both, with various toolkits such as Tk, Wx, Qt, GTK.
>
>
>
> > I don't know how to create and write a Python project with Eclipse to
> > tell it to "be" a web service or a web app, or if what I need to do in
> > the code to make as such, no "run" it from Eclipse to launch the app
> > in a web server and launch a browser automatically.  Can I debug after
> > doing this?  In other words, can I put break points in my web services
> > or web apps and go back into the IDE to step through the code for web
> > services and web apps?
>
> First of all: in python, you don't code like in VisualStudio, with an
> application template wizard. You simply start coding. Some of the
> frameworks such as TurboGears and Django actually do have such wizards,
> but they aren't integrated into the IDE, and once you started, you don't
> automate anything further. And usually, this is a good thing - the
> wizard-stuff is for languages that need a lot of boilerplate. Python is
> quite successful in not needing that.
>
> Debugging is certainly possible the way you want it, or at least close
> to that. I personally am satisfied with the built-in debugger, pdb. But
> PyDev comes with one that's supposed to be quite good as well, and
> winpdb is also deemed excellent.
>
>
>
> > Also, I'm not tied to Eclipse.  I'm totally open to other IDEs as
> > well.  SharpDevelop with the Python plugin looks interesting too.
>
> > And finally, I'm not completely committed to using Windows to host my
> > development either.  I'm willing to use Linux too (but would prefer
> > Windows... at least to get started, until I'm comfortable enough with
> > Python).
>
> Cross-platform, especially within the web-world, is usually a no-brainer
> in python.
>
> Diez

Thanks Diez!  Both your and Alex's advice are a great help!