Python Fiddle, an IDE That Runs In Your Browser

An anonymous reader writes "The site Python Fiddle, like the similarly named jsFiddle, allows users to post code and share it with others. However, unlike jsfiddle, pythonfiddle brings a major advancement with the Python language, which fully runs in the browser."

Comments

Slow Loading

[FrootLoops]

At first I thought the interface was awful, but apparently it just takes a while to load.

Re:Slow Loading

[Sarusa]

For me it loaded almost instantly... but would never run anything. Even just
          print "hello"
would never enable the Run button.

Tried it in another browser and 'Oh sorry, that's not a supported browser.'

Dear Developers..

[Severus Snape]

Stop trying to reinvent the wheel, my applications work just fine without the need for a web browser.

Re:Dear Developers..

[hairyfeet]

But everyone has to jump in on the latest fad, don't you know that? I remember the "it'll all be thin clients all the way down!" fad, the grid computing fad, and now the "all you need is a browser and the magical perfect cloud!" fad.

The fads they come, the fads they go, but there is a damned good reason why desktops have been virtually unchanged in the past twenty years design wise, and that is because they WORK. Having lots of processing power, memory, and storage, all at the user's fingertips? it is nice, it makes things faster and works even without the magic cloud. But everyone needs to jump on the fads or else they wouldn't be fads now would they?

But hey, if making an IDE run really REALLY slow by sticking it in a browser gives them a happy? More power to them I say. Some make models, some play guitar, if jamming an IDE in a browser is what they like to blow their weekends on different strokes.

Re:Dear Developers..

[FlyingGuy]

Dear Anonymous COWARD

If software developers actually wrote and deployed their applications correctly a lot of whats broken in Windows would actually be fixed!

This is not to say that Windows does not have problems, it has TONS of them, but many many of them would be resolved if the idiots actually wrote applications that did not:

• Put their data files in "/program files".
• Fail to set the correct rights to the registry keys they create on install.
• Require "power user" or above permissions.
• Scatter their damn DLL's all over the fucking hard drive, then rely on the OS to track them down and do the loading for them instead of keeping them with their main executable and loading and unloading them explicitly with their program.
• Put all sorts of shit in the system or system32 directory.

That is but a tiny sample of the brain dead shit that application programmers do which in turn causes all sorts of chaos in windows. YES Microsfot did build a whole shit load of supidity into Windows but the people who write software for it are even worse since they simple never do it correctly.

Re:Dear Developers..

[Nimey]

I actually had a discussion with a vendor whose code put their data in Program Files, which I had bollocked him for. IIRC his reason was because he wanted to coexist well with Terminal Services or Citrix summat.

Assuming he was correct, then that's a Microsoft and/or Citrix problem - they shouldn't write their stuff to require storing data /there/ of all places.

ln -sf browser operating_system

[smoothnorman]

and in the end, (which, of course, is a "new beginning") what was the browser will want to be able to run a new and shiny alternative browser...

It would be a lot easier...

[drb226]

...to just build the Python interpreter right into browsers, like JavaScript.

standard lib doesnt even work

[rla3rd]

import datetime print datetime.datetime.today()
Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in ImportError: Could not evaluate dynamic lib: //lib/python2.7/datetime.so

Re:Works Well!

[kbolino]

You know not only can you pin it to your Start Menu (which you've been able to do since Windows XP), but you can also pin it to the freakin' taskbar! Right click on the icon, click "Pin to Taskbar", and voila it will always be on your taskbar, even when it's not open.

Re:It makes Eclipse with PyDev feel responsive.

[oakgrove]

I have a several years old Thinkpad R60 with a T7200 core2duo in it running Ubuntu 11.04 and eclipse/pydev is very fast. Maybe you are having a hardware issue.

Smalltalk has this.

[mikevdg]

Oh, so it's a bit like: http://code.google.com/p/smalltalklabsbrowser/ or http://www.seaside.st/about/screenshots?_k=YFNy7uUZ

Re:It makes Eclipse with PyDev feel responsive.

[FrootLoops]

You might have picked a better criticism of Visual Studio than "it takes up too much hard disk space." That's a pretty weak criticism in today's world of very cheap, very large drives.[on this scale].

Re:wow, this is a great leap forward

[drosboro]

Actually, one really useful benefit of this will be for education. When my introductory programming class starts in a week's time, I'll be able to send them here for the first few weeks, while they're figuring out Python basics, and before they've got a proper Python installation on their own computers (high school kids, some of whose parents lock down computers pretty tightly). It should help us get around the "I can't do my homework, because my dad won't let me install software on the computer" nonsense. :)

Re:Source code?

[MaxShaw]

This is using my Empythoned build, which is CPython compiled using Emscripten. The version up on the repository is a little outdated, and the one the PythonFiddle guys are using is even older, which is why a lot of the standard library doesn't work on theirs.

Re:It makes Eclipse with PyDev feel responsive.

[Eskarel]

The fundamental problem with Eclipse is that it runs on the JRE, which fundamentally makes its memory management bloody awful, that's not because Java is bad at memory, it's because the JRE is bad at memory. You need to specify the maximum amount of memory it is allowed to use, and the minimum amount of memory it has to start with. Get those numbers wrong and your performance in the application is fairly shocking for large projects because you page in and out all the time or the performance of your machine is fairly shocking because you've allocated too much memory. The JRE, at least on Windows, isn't super great at moving between those two numbers either.

Visual Studio runs as native code and so is both more responsive and takes absolutely no configuration to get up and running. Eclipse can be made to operate in a relatively efficient manner(depending on the JRE versions you have available to you), but it isn't like that out of the box, whereas VS is.

Add in the fact that Visual Studio has improved an awful lot over the last few iterations whereas eclipse hasn't(though to be fair it was a lot better to start with), .NET is currently beating the pants of Java, and you start seeing VS coming out on top for a lot of people. I personally love eclipse, it's the best Java IDE I've ever used, and I can make it do almost anything I want either with 3rd party plugins or if I'm desperate my own code. On the other hand, Visual Studio 2010 is a seriously nice IDE, and .NET has improved a lot while Java has been rotting in the JCP for the last 5 years. Java 8 which isn't due out till next year won't even catch up on what .NET has right now, and if you're running on Windows it performs better and is easier to configure.

I love Java, but Oracle has a long way to go to get it back up to snuff.