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They want you moving towards a PaaS type infrastructure. https://www.openshift.com/ https://www.heroku.com/ http://www.activestate.com/sta... ... So yes an entirely new stack but one that is already well tested and in use. The entire concept of how you do internal tooling should be changing.

You sound like you are interested.

If I can make a suggestion: http://www.activestate.com/sta... is a terrific way for you to start playing with containers. It is a mini PaaS that runs in a VM based on Docker containers and it is free for small usages.

Know any example of a Windows-compatible open source project that doesn't distribute binaries?

Almost all of the ones I have downloaded recently don't distribute binaries for Windows. Usually someone else forks the project and makes their own installer like http://rubyinstaller.org/ for example. Or, http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads or http://strawberryperl.com/ or http://dwimperl.com/windows.html . The makers of popular languages like Perl and Ruby don't bother making installers. They just put up links to other people who do it. Some times other projects lag significantly behind the main project.

FWIW, I also had a hard time finding a good text editor for OS X. I used TextWrangler for a while but never liked it as much as Notepad++. These days I use Komodo Edit (free) and I highly recommend it. It's based on Scintilla, which I've always preferred the look of, and it has a lot of useful features built in, like regex find/replace in folders, without feeling too bloated.

Beyond this, why not get companies like ActiveState to weigh in? I'm sure they don't want ActivePython (MSRP $999) to suddenly be infringing.

Since I know some of the guys from ActiveState read Slashdot, I think the issue should be resolved within the day (after they sic their lawyers on the issue).

Komodo Edit is pretty good for Python, and easy enough to shove on a USB stick.

I agree with Python, and be sure to check out ActiveStates's Komodo Edit as your development environment.

I have written a few apps using Tornado... So far it is my favorite framework for developing rich web applications. I contributed code/patches that the Tornado devs used to add SSL support to the framework. Also, just the other day I completed a Kerberos/AD/SSO authentication module for Tornado (I'll be making it available soon I hope).

My favorite feature of Tornado is the built-in support for WebSockets. It should also be mentioned that it is one of (if not THE) fastest Python web frameworks.

I also want to mention that for one-off/quick development web applications that don't need to be super fast I almost always use CherryPy. It is much simpler/quicker to develop with CherryPy than Tornado. You lose out big time on speed but the development time of CherryPy apps is very impressive. I wrote a reporting tool for my job that would examine a passwd file and then check it against Active Directory for uid/gid/shell/homedir conflicts and report the results on a pretty page using jqGrid. Users could even click a button to export the grid to spreadsheet format. Total development time: 16 hours (and that includes lunch breaks and five or six hour long conference calls)! Needless to say my boss was ecstatic, my coworkers were amazed, and the people who ended up using the tool asked me how much it cost (as if we bought it).

To bridge the gap between CherryPy and Tornado I actually wrote a MethodDispatcher that lets you port a CherryPy app to Tornado with a trivial amount of effort. Of course, it also lets you write a Tornado app "the CherryPy way" which, while a bit strange sitting on top of Tornado, is much simpler and allows for faster development time.

As for the differences between some popular frameworks I wrote up a pretty good explanation over at Stackoverflow.

For reference, here's some apps I've developed using Tornado: Gate One (still developing it), PyCI (no longer maintaining it though--I hope to revisit it some day when I have time, sigh), Escape From The Web, and here's a writeup of mine on how to develop an application similar to my reporting tool using CherryPy and jqGrid in no time at all.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcl/ says: "Tool Command Language (Tcl) is an interpreted language and very portable interpreter for that language. Tcl is embeddable and extensible, and has been widely used since its creation in 1988 by John Ousterhout. See http://www.tcl.tk/ for more info." Another good source of information on Tcl is http://wiki.tcl.tk/

Tcl functions well as glue between applications. Some folks know Tcl but call it "Expect" and may not realize Expect is simply Tcl plus an extension. Another extension, Tk, provides GUI features and is so powerful and popular that it's commonly used from other languages. Bindings exist for several other languages, including Ada (called TASH), Perl, Python (called Tkinter), Ruby, and Common Lisp.

Tcl is used by many people and companies (large and small). Cisco network gear uses embedded Tcl for automating tasks. Oracle uses Tcl for automating testing. The Fortune100 company where I work (but I am not a spokesman, so I won't name them) pays me to write and maintain an application written in Tcl to process payments for many thousands of customers totaling millions of dollars every day for payment through banks and the Federal Reserve.

Tcl is FOSS, but a very popular build is ActiveTcl from ActiveState. http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/

accurately describes this as a tool for pre/post validation of method arguments and return values

Now that makes more sense.

As a side note, Python is able to do this by means of decorators and now with annotations in Python 3. Here's some example code.

here

Hmm.

ActiveState has left a bad taste in my mouth in the past. My quick research just now may have dug up some reasons to re-evaluate them.

Good points.

See Active State product description page and RTFA where the versions of Active state that will include this package are listed.

"ActivePython now includes NumPy,SciPy, and matplotlib in ActivePython Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions"
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2010/06/saving-world-economic-collapse-python

Product comparison:
http://www.activestate.com/compare-editions

IOW, these packages are available for the lowest price possible (the Biz edition) of $750 per server/yr).

Good points.

See Active State product description page and RTFA where the versions of Active state that will include this package are listed.

"ActivePython now includes NumPy,SciPy, and matplotlib in ActivePython Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions"
http://www.activestate.com/blog/2010/06/saving-world-economic-collapse-python

Product comparison:
http://www.activestate.com/compare-editions

IOW, these packages are available for the lowest price possible (the Biz edition) of $750 per server/yr).

TFA and TFS fail to mention that SciPy, Numpy and Matplotlib have been added only to the Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions of ActivePython. The Community Edition (the only one that's free) doesn't contain these libraries.

http://www.activestate.com/activepython

install python from http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads
download gdata from http://code.google.com/p/gdata-python-client/downloads/detail?name=gdata-2.0.10.zip&can=2&q=
download googlecl from http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/downloads/detail?name=googlecl-0.9.5.tar.gz&can=2&q=
unpack gdata and googlecl into their own dirs (I used 7zip)
in gdata and then googlecl dirs run python setup.py install
googlecl will be in c:\python26\scripts
the rest is left as an exercise to the reader but wrapping it in a cmd script is trivial

You may find this helpful. There's also a comment there about cleaning up places.sqlite using the built-in javascript console.

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576843-firefox-sqlite-files-cleaner-linux/

I tried it and it appears to have cleaned the residual urls there. What's left in the strings output seems to be related to bookmarks.

Yes, Kahan summation helps (as long as the compiler doesn't break it), but it doesn't completely eliminate the problem. Shewchuk summation, on the other hand, does: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/393090-binary-floating-point-summation-accurate-to-full-p/

Trac + some extensions should do the trick.

Activestate offers a great setup for a relative bargain that seems to do everything you're looking for.
http://www.activestate.com/firefly/

While you're waiting for Strawberry Perl to put out a release, why not try a package from a company that has their stuff together? Activestate's ActivePerl 5.12.0 is free-for-non-commercial-use and already out. 32- and 64-bit builds for Windows, Mac, and select Linux distros are available.

Oh yes, and I've actually remembered one existing commercial (and fairly popular in its niche) product that's built on XUL: ActiveState Komodo.

Komodo edit has a nice VIM emulation feature.. It is a little slow with huge text files but works great for editing source. Too bad there's no Solaris version I can use at work though :( http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

Netbeans with the Vi Vim for netbeans plugin.
 
Netbeans is FOSS, runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. It handles Java, C/C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Groovy and does a bunch of other stuff.
 
There is the viPlugin for Eclipse as well - I just happen to like Netbeans better.
 
The ActiveState folks list VI key bindings as a feature for their Komodo and Komodo Edit products. These are closed source though Komodo Edit is free as in beer. It is cross platform - covering the win/lin/mac world.
 
I'm sure there are other options but those are the largest projects I know of that do what you want.

That would be awful for Python. Python doesn't use curly brackets but instead uses whitespace. You can't tab in ideone because it's a textarea in the browser.

Sure you can C&P into ideone but what's the point? I'm not sure if the standard Python distro comes with it but installing the active state python distor which has Python Win. http://www.activestate.com/activepython/

It's basically Notepad with the interactive Python shell so you can open it and just type code and watch what it would do (same as typing python in a command prompt) or write a whole script, save and run it. It's very lightweight and doesn't really hold you hand.

Today I saw a video presentation of a new product called Firefly by ActiveState (The folks that publish a popular Win32 perl). Not FOSS, in fact, they host the whole thing on their server. At least there's nothing to install. You can get a free account and set up projects but if you want to set up a private project (i.e. one that's only accessible to your group) you'll need to pay. They cater to many development methodologies. Also they allow you to use a couple of choices for version control--Mercurial and Subversion. It includes a ticketing system and a feature that allows you to see what code changes were done in the fixing of an issue. http://www.activestate.com/ I think it's usable.

I bet you are right. These are government windows guys.

Here, use this to tell if it changed:
md5sum

If you're using Eclipse for Perl/PHP/Python and web standards (X/HTML/Javascript/CSS), then you may want to check out Komodo Edit.

For Java, it's hard to beat Eclipse, but for the other things you mentioned Eclipse is a bit heavy, IMO. Needless to say, if you have everything integrated into Eclipse so that you can do Java and the other languages, then you're probably better off with just one IDE. However I find Komodo very useful for dynamic languages as well as web standards.

I use nano, textwrangler, and jEdit...

I found jEdit to be sluggish at times. It was just as powerful as I required, but I wound up switching to Komodo Edit. It's code validation leaved jEdit in the dust and it just about matches the other features I need.

Still based on a bloaty framework, but not as :)

A decent Perl distro for Windows is free.

vim works perfectly well under Windows.

If you can't find a replacement for the others, look at cygwin to run many more *nix programs and utilities... including a real shell ("cli").

You can work around many Windows shortcomings and end up with something that works for you.

Trolling? I'll bite.

Free: http://pythonide.blogspot.com/search/label/spe
Free: http://die-offenbachs.de/eric/index.html
Free: http://docs.python.org/library/pdb.html#module-pdb (and included with Python)
Commercial, but excellent (my team uses it): http://www.wingware.com/
Commercial: http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/index.mhtml

If you really love Visual Studio for some reason: http://www.activestate.com/Products/visual_python/index.plex
If you love Eclipse: http://pydev.sourceforge.net/

And for the lazy, "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()" has always been my favorite way to debug python software. Add that line anywhere; get a breakpoint. Make it conditional with an if statement.

Not to mention introspection right down to the bytecode at runtime (there is even a Python module that lets you edit the bytecode at runtime, if you are sufficiently crazy).

In short, you have not used Python for more than 10 minutes if you really think the debugging isn't good.

IHBT. HAND.

Trolling? I'll bite.

Free: http://pythonide.blogspot.com/search/label/spe
Free: http://die-offenbachs.de/eric/index.html
Free: http://docs.python.org/library/pdb.html#module-pdb (and included with Python)
Commercial, but excellent (my team uses it): http://www.wingware.com/
Commercial: http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/index.mhtml

If you really love Visual Studio for some reason: http://www.activestate.com/Products/visual_python/index.plex
If you love Eclipse: http://pydev.sourceforge.net/

And for the lazy, "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()" has always been my favorite way to debug python software. Add that line anywhere; get a breakpoint. Make it conditional with an if statement.

Not to mention introspection right down to the bytecode at runtime (there is even a Python module that lets you edit the bytecode at runtime, if you are sufficiently crazy).

In short, you have not used Python for more than 10 minutes if you really think the debugging isn't good.

IHBT. HAND.

I used to use jEdit. It's a decent text editor, but now I use Notepad++. I'm also trying Komodo Edit as a possible replacement to Notepad++. All three editors are open source, but Notepad++ is Windows only.

[This is where someone else who knows something about crypto chimes in... I just know this because I'd seen someone else getting called out on this misconception.]

W007! I actually do know something about crypto (as well as number theory, which is useful and fun).

You are right about the fact that, if SALT were transmitted through plaintext every time, it would only be a matter of time before SECRET would be able to be deduced (assuming that the method of breaking the overall WPA encryption allows you to figure out the encryption key being used [I don't know too much about WPA in particular, so I'm not sure if it is public key or not]).

I should have been clearer. Every XX minutes, a different SALT is transmitted via ciphertext.

This increases the complexity of the problem significantly:

You must break the first encryption key and gain the full key. The key looks something like:
a8fbcd1db5a6bf013763fd45a32f2b319bfba413

You must break the second encryption key. Again, the key looks something like:
216cd69e6e4112b6adffec1853ae415b0fa45fcf

[Wash, rinse, repeat]

You eventually have enough keys lined up to figure out that they use the sha1sum and all start with "this is insanity ", therefore SECRET="this is insanity ".

The problem is that you have to break the encryption scheme enough times to gain enough keys to establish what SECRET is. Then you have to break the hash. If it is a particularly good hash (i.e. NOT MD5 OR SHA1!) and the key that you are hashing has sufficient entropy (i.e. consists of random data) then you shouldn't be able to break the hash using a rainbow table, and brute force might be necessary.

Now, you can always try to mathematically find a flaw in the hash or encryption scheme, but that is a different problem. Personally, I wouldn't trust an encryption scheme designed by someone else unless I had the mathematical background to prove it, which, in the case of RSA, I do. Therefore, I would use RSA with as large a key and block size as is feasible. I'd probably also write my own implementation.

(I must confess, though, that the implementation I wrote to which I have linked is not by any means secure as it stands. It is also probably buggy, as I spent maybe half an hour on it at most. Someone commented on another recipe that writing RSA should be simple, and so I took the opportunity to write it.)

Suits who pick the technology are usually wrong, and seldom obeyed.

Strawberry Perl and ActivePerl are both pretty nice packages. Many Win32 modules like Win32::OLE, Win32::API, and more in the Win32 and Win32API namespaces are perfectly usable.

The places most qualified to answer specific questions are probably comp.lang.perl.moderated (or maybe comp.lang.perl.misc) and Perlmonks. I don't know too much first-hand about PerlGuru, but they do have a section specific to Win32 programming with Perl and I've heard some good things.

When .NET 1.0 was released, ActiveState released Visual Perl, the product is dead since 2005, so probably nobody wanted it.

Visual Perl was their Visual Studio integration for Perl. It allowed you to create VS.NET projects that were Perl projects and interactively debug them using the VS debugger. It's different from the .NET integration, which is in the Perl Dev Kit.

When .NET 1.0 was released, ActiveState released Visual Perl, the product is dead since 2005, so probably nobody wanted it.

Perl is an antique language. You should look at a modern scripting language. Powershell is much more powerful as it pipes .net objects instead of text.

But ActiveState (who make one of the Win32 perl distros) has a commercial package "Perl Dev Kit" that has .NET integration -- see their feature list. I haven't tried it out myself, so I can't comment on how well it works.

If you need to just use .NET components from Perl, you could always use the expose the .NET interfaces over COM and then use Win32::OLE to access them.

Part of the problem is that Perl is not a specified language; the specification is the Perl interpreter itself (see the "Design" section from the wikipedia entry)

The documentation is also online at http://tcl.activestate.com/man/tcl8.5/ if you want it on the net.

Another good one would be the Python Cookbook on ASPN. And at a more abstract level, Ward's Wiki has explanations and discussions of a wide range of interesting tools, languages, and techniques.

Komodo Edit, as stated above is very nice. The free version though, does not include the debugger. Komodo Edit vs. Komodo IDE. I use Komodo IDE for Python and PHP (w/xdebug). Not to mention being able to change vars on the fly and re-step over some code is always nice. It is rather expensive, but worth the money. The only pet peeve I have is that there are sometimes tabbing and spacing issues that you can configure from the settings, but they take a few times to get them right. I am on a slightly older version and I haven't updated to the latest so this could be a non-issue now. SPE is kind of nice too. I can't remember at the moment why I liked Komodo better, but then again I am still "evaluating" Komodo :-)

Erics Python IDE

Wing IDE

Komodo

If you're hell-bent on using an Editor, I can warmly recommend jEdit for Python stuff. It's the best Editor in existance.

And one more thing: There is this think called 'Google', you may have heard of it. It usually answers this sort of question in under 10 seconds.

If you have $300

komodo edit is an extremely powerful editor that works with a slew of languages on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is free as in beer. It is packaged by ActiveState as just an editor - but really it has many features that fall more into the IDE camp - yet it is light-weight and responsive - more like an editor. This review of komodo edit may be helpful.
 
  Komodo IDE is the big brother to Komodo edit I guess. I've never used it because the cost is outside my budget. ($295 for a full single user license - there is a student version but I don't know what it costs)
 
  SPE is free/free I believe. It is multiplatform and the price is right to at least give it a try.
 
All these and more are listed on the python ide page of the python.org wiki.
 
Personally - right now I use Komodo edit while I wait for python support in netbeans.

komodo edit is an extremely powerful editor that works with a slew of languages on Windows, Mac and Linux. It is free as in beer. It is packaged by ActiveState as just an editor - but really it has many features that fall more into the IDE camp - yet it is light-weight and responsive - more like an editor. This review of komodo edit may be helpful.
 
  Komodo IDE is the big brother to Komodo edit I guess. I've never used it because the cost is outside my budget. ($295 for a full single user license - there is a student version but I don't know what it costs)
 
  SPE is free/free I believe. It is multiplatform and the price is right to at least give it a try.
 
All these and more are listed on the python ide page of the python.org wiki.
 
Personally - right now I use Komodo edit while I wait for python support in netbeans.

for free from http://www.activestate.com/Products/activeperl/ since it is not effected by this bug. Seriously, this is far from the first time that Red Hat has botched the dynamic language environments it ships.

Actually, all of Internet Explorer's scripting support comes via the Windows Script architecture, which is supported by various script language developers. ActivePython is one of them, so it's possible to use Python in IE right now if you want.

The two major problems are lack of sandboxing (at the language feature and library levels), which makes it a security risk for anything from untrusted sources, and lack of widespread use to enable it on the web at large.

One thing Silverlight brings to the table is a security architecture, so things running on top of it -- like the DLR Ruby implementation -- are already sandboxed.

Works under windows pretty easily.. I'm a perl noob and I figured it out. You just need win32 wget, ActivePerl, and escape the filename a little differently:

system("wget -O \"$filename\" $download_link");

Throw wget on your path, and away you go..

I'm sure it's just me.

It's not just you. Python exposes the locking mechanisms of the underlying platform and doesn't try to abstract any further than that.

If you want simple, portable locking, use this recipe from ASPN:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/65203

I have to respond here because most of the responses here are sorely outdated and just plain wrong.
Tcl the language isn't perfect, no language is, but it IS evolving and you have to look a the total SUM of the parts that are offered.
The big picture here is Tcl/Tk does a LOT of things VERY well!

Tk: Tk is still a relevant and up-to-date toolkit. As of the latest release (8.5) it has a comprehensive collection of theme-able widgets that look native on Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. Plus, you can still program your GUIs the same way it's been done for years and not have to learn the latest "framework of the week"... Plus it is SMALL, the entire Tcl language AND Tk toolkit on Windows can be encapsulated in a 1.6MB DLL!
It is still incredibly easy to use:
button .b -text "Hello, world"
pack .b

SQLite: The author of SQLite is a big fan and user of Tcl and provides one binding with SQLite ... to Tcl! Needless to say it is a top-notch and easy to use binding, probably the best one available for SQLite. Tcl and SQLite are a perfect match for each other.

Distribution: As was mentioned here in another post, Tcl/Tk applications are very easy to create AND distribute! No need to worry about having huge runtime systems installed on the user's machine as is required by Java, .NET, Adobe AIR, with versioning issues, etc. Just include the small Tcl/Tk platform-specific library(s) with your application and they're good to go! There are various methods available for distributing your apps: Starkits, Freewrap, etc.

Tcl: Consistent, easy-to-understand and incredibly flexible syntax. Procedural, functional, object-oriented. Bytecode compiled.

Plus there's all the other things that Tcl/Tk has done well for a LONG time such as proper Unicode support, cross-platform applications, open source, multiple OOP options (soon we'll have OOP in the core), Virtual File System, powerful Tk canvas and text widgets, on-the-fly bytecode compilation, proper multi-threading, the new Teapot/Teacup package distribution system (awesome!), etc... it goes on and on.

Give it a new, fresh, honest look and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised!

http://www.tcl.tk/ (official Tcl/Tk website)
http://www.activestate.com/ (download FREE ActiveTcl)
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.tcl/topics (VERY helpful newsgroup)

Open Komodo or Komodo Edit - It's free, cross-platform, and code-completion is the best I have seen in a PHP IDE (Although it does much more than just PHP). It will pull up methods from classes that you have instantiated that it has parsed from your "include" or "require" calls. Every PHP coder I have turned it on to love it. Although there are a few bugs with tab spacing, but I imagine those will be ironed out soon enough.
The Pro version also include XDebug capabilities, amount others, which can completely eliminate the old quick and dirty "echo" debugging.... I know I know so bad, so bad