graphical or flow charting design aid for python class development?

[William Gill]

Being somewhat new to Python, and having a tendency to over complicate
things in my class design, I was wondering if anyone can suggest a
simple graphical or flowcharting tool that they use to organize their
class and program design? Because of a 55 mph head-on accident a few
years back, I have short term memory problems, so flipping back and
forth between pages of code is next to impossible for me to keep
straight. A simple graphical model would allow me to 'see' everything
in one view, and better organize my resulting code. I have had limited
success using pydoc to view my classes, but it's not really much help in
development, just review, and sometimes there is too much info.

I have used editors for other languages that allow the view to expand
and collapse functions/methods (like message threads here on the board),
which help, but I haven't seen anything like this for python.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Bill

 

[tooper]

You may want to use Doxygen, which generates nice diagrams. It's
normally only for C++, but there are nice filters (for ex.
http://i31www.ira.uka.de/~baas/pydoxy) that generates C++ header from
python code that Doxygen can crunch.

Another solution is to use IDE such as Eric3 that can generate UML
diags from source code on the fly.

 

[gene tani]

Have you looked at class browser module? Not the graphical tool you're
looking for, but maybe a good start

http://www.python.org/doc/2.0.1/lib/module-pyclbr.html

 

[William Gill]

Have you looked at class browser module? Not the graphical tool you're
looking for, but maybe a good start

No, it's not graphical, but it looks like I may be able to use it to put
together a nice outline, or summary of my modules. It's worth
exploring, thanks.

Bill

 

[William Gill]

On first glance Doxygen doesn't look like the ticket, but the screen
shots of Eric3 look VERY promising. I have already downloaded it, and
will try it.

Thanks,
Bill

 

[Michael Ekstrand]

Being somewhat new to Python, and having a tendency to over
complicate things in my class design, I was wondering if anyone can
suggest a simple graphical or flowcharting tool that they use to
organize their class and program design?

I've had good success using the UML templates provided by Dia. There
can be some interesting issues printing, but on a whole, they work quit
well for drawing class diagrams.

-Michael

 

[gene tani]

forgot mention Komodo's code and object browser, which're both in the
$30 license

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/docs/Komodo/3.1/komodo-doc-codeintel.html#codeintel_codebrowser

and SPE's supposed to have some kinda class explorer
http://www.stani.be/python/spe

 

[Paul McGuire]

It's not free, but it is pretty cheap considering all it can do. Check
out Enterprise Architect (with the free add-in for Python) from
www.sparxsystems.com.au. Pro version license is US$180 or so, but they
may have a student license for less that you could use.

-- Paul

 

[William Gill]

Thanks everyone. I will explore all the suggestions, but it looks like
SPE is the immediate answer.

Bill

 

[gene tani]

There's also this about giving source/class browsers a hand by
sprinkling "isinstance()"'s in

http://wingware.com/doc/intro/tutorial-sassist-with-classes

I always encourage people to write up their experience/improessions in
the python wiki:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonEditors
(or the separate IDE page)

 

[Florian Diesch]

Being somewhat new to Python, and having a tendency to over complicate
things in my class design, I was wondering if anyone can suggest a
simple graphical or flowcharting tool that they use to organize their
class and program design? Because of a 55 mph head-on accident a few

For Linux/Unix there is dia <http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia> to make
a class diagram and dia2code <http://dia2code.sourceforge.net> to create
Python code from it.

Probably you can find some other UML tools that support Python.

I have used editors for other languages that allow the view to expand
and collapse functions/methods (like message threads here on the board),
which help, but I haven't seen anything like this for python.

For questions like "Is there an editor that supports...", "Emacs" is
about always an answer ;-) It has outline-mode for this.


Florian