I do a fair amount of manual refactoring. I've used WebSphere Studio (Eclipse) to do some automated refactoring, so I have some experience in using IDE's which exploit Java's static type-checking.

However, the question of type checking in a dynamic language is interesting. I don't use a sophisticated IDE for …

Simple object persistence (i.e., serialization to a file system) is what pickle, marshal and shelve do.

However, here's the next thing of some interest OODB's.

Zope's ZODB . The original OODB for Python, the backbone of Zope.

buzhug : "a fast, pure-Python database engine, using a syntax that Python programmers should …

This is something that elevates Doctest into the realm of Pattern. Perhaps even above that.

The idea is so elegant: the document is the test, and the test procedure is the document.

There's a DRY clarity to the whole thing that is rather exciting. It is an elegant application of …

Ian Bicking: A Blog http://blog.ianbicking.org/, provided some info on Py3K and Python Introspection http://blog.ianbicking.org/introspecting-expressions-in-py3k.html.

For me, the interesting part was his summary of Object-Relational Mapping. Mr. Bicking identifies two broad approaches: lambda introspection and operator overloading.

A number of testing frameworks were used. The Agile Testing tutorial provides a path through the toolsets, showing what you can do, and how you should do it.

Unit Testing: [Nose ], <{filename}/blog/2005/11/2005_11_09-compare_and_contrast_round_3_revised.rst>

Acceptance Testing: [FitNesse ]

Regression Testing: [TextTest ]

Functional Testing: [twill ]. A thorough analysis is …

testresources http://www.robertcollins.net/unittest/testresources/ purpose appears to be to manage the resources used by a test suite.

Adding this resource management context extends the Test Suite to optimize tests around the resources. This can reshuffle the TestCases to minimize SetUp's. This can be useful in contexts where …

SubUnit's http://www.robertcollins.net/unittest/subunit/ purpose appears to be to manage testing via subprocesses.

Consequently, it can run external tests not in Python, it can fork a subprocess to manage the Fixture in an isolated process.

Adding this subprocess execution context extends the Test Runner implementation of the …

Trial is not really a stand-alone unit test framework. It is an extension to unittest focused on the testing needs for the Twisted framework.

The Trial how-to http://twistedmatrix.com/projects/core/documentation/howto/testing.html has some information. More valuable, perhaps are the API documents http://twistedmatrix.com/documents …

A wiki page on Python testing tools http://pycheesecake.org/wiki/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy identifies a number of additional unit testing tools. The wiki page provides a handy summary. I'll examine these in light of the Beck Unit Test design patterns to provide a little more detail on what they really do …

The object-oriented unit testing framework began as Smalltalk's Beck Test framework http://www.xprogramming.com/testfram.htm. It evolved to the JUnit http://www.junit.org/index.htm>`_ ` <http://www.junit.org/index.htm%22%20target=%22NewWindow framework for Java. Beck defined four repeated patterns of unit testing software …