ActiveState Komodo 5.0

Name: ActiveState Komodo 5.0
Rating: None
Author: James R. Borck

King of the dynamic IDEs.

James R. Borck

InfoWorld

06/04/09

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Pros

New code formatting tools, performance issues have been addressed, feature rich

Cons

Lacks a GUI toolkit, could do a better job with the developer aids, ActiveState's PPM is still not supported on 64-bit installs

Bottom Line

If you're in need of an IDE that can flexibly bridge multiple languages, support distributed teams with ease, and ultimately improve code quality and streamline development cycles, you'll want to take a close look at Komodo 5.

Would you buy this?

Yes 0
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Price
$ 295.00 (AUD)

On the minus side, Komodo lacks a GUI toolkit. ActiveState used to include GUI construction for Tcl, but the tools for GUI development have been withdrawn.

ActiveState could also do a better job with the developer aids. A good number of sample project templates and code snippets are provided for each of the supported languages, but most offer little more than basic skeletons. More functional code samples would be warmly welcomed.

Finally, ActiveState's PPM (Perl Package Manager) — which facilitates module management and updates in the company's Perl distributions — is still not supported on 64-bit installs. I'm hopeful this gets resolved sooner rather than later.

But Komodo's shortcomings are greatly overshadowed by its advantages. If you're in need of an IDE that can flexibly bridge multiple languages, support distributed teams with ease, and ultimately improve code quality and streamline development cycles, you'll want to take a close look at Komodo 5. An extremely flexible licensing scheme, allowing developers to run Komodo concurrently on all supported platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) from a single license, only sweetens the deal.