Python Community Server: Development

After coding ThinBlog yesterday in UltraEdit, I thought I'd take another look at Eclipse, IBM's open source Java IDE.  A visitor at work the other day was really enthusiastic about it, but last time I tried it I couldn't even figure out how to create a new project.

Anyway, either it's changed a lot (it's up to version 2.0; last time it was pre-1.0) or I've got better at finding dialog boxes, because it seems like a pretty good IDE this time.  The debugger worked nicely to iron out one of the kinks in my code (it wasn't getting the blog name when connecting to Radio as Radio calls it 'blogname' rather than 'blogName'), and it seemed pretty fast.

Also, it has documentation now!  Here's the SWT FAQ, which introduces Eclipse's fast GUI library.  Somewhat heftier than Thinlet at 2-3 Mb, but also rather more functional and native-looking.  The detailed documentation goes over the widgets and introduces how to use the library in general.

The only downside is that it looks like coding up dialogs will be quite a bit more work than in VS.Net.  Does anyone feel like writing an XUL parser that outputs SWT Java code? ;-)