David looks at four open source development environments for working with Python code on Unix-like operating systems. He evaluates two general-purpose editors/environments and two Python-specific ones, and compares the merits of each.

As with its sister project, ZSI, SOAPpy has enjoyed a recent increase in activity and is now in version 0.11.3. This version includes WSDL support and many other improvements. Uche Ogbuji and Scott Archer try out this new version with the same complex Web service they tried accessing with ZSI 1.4.1 and ran into a different set of difficulties.

The last time ZSI was covered in this column, it was version 1.2. ZSI has enjoyed a recent spate of activity including the contributions for other developers besides the lead Rich Salz. It is now in version 1.4.1 and has added some WSDL support. Uche Ogbuji and Scott Archer take a look at these new developments and also discover a third-party wrapper option for ZSI.

In this installment of The Python Web services developer, Mike Olson gets back to writing some Python code. This column will revisit the example code from the fifth and sixth columns in this series, in which Mike and Uche Ogbuji talked about SOAP.py and ZSI, two available SOAP implementations in Python. Mike will continue the examination of these libraries and see how they interact with each other.

Continuing their look at Python SOAP implementations, Mike Olson and Uche Ogbuji put the Zolera SOAP Infrastructure (ZSI) through its paces as a SOAP client and server library. They find that ZSI is possibly the best tool for SOAP use under Python right now.

n this first of a two-part series, Web services columnists Mike Olson and Uche Ogbuji discuss the various SOAP implementations available for Python, giving detailed code examples.

In Part 1 of this series, Keyton introduced his Puffin framework and showed how it helps you automate (potentially interrelated) HTTP calls in order to test a dynamic Web application. Since that article appeared, Keyton has redesigned and expanded the core engine. The latest version of the Puffin framework now allows you to automate a wider variety of actions including Web, file, database, socket, and command line (along with custom actions that are a simple framework extension away). With these latest improvements, you can now use Puffin (renamed the Puffin Automation Framework) for not only Web application testing but also system monitoring and data transfer automation. This article introduces the key concepts behind the system's architectural improvements and discusses its newly extended use.

This first of four articles introduces the Puffin testing system. Puffin is an open source framework for testing Web applications. With Puffin you can build dynamically driven regression tests for even the most complex Web applications. Written in 100% Python, Puffin is easily extended to handle even obscure testing conditions.

RSS is one of the most successful XML services ever. Despite its chaotic roots, it has become the community standard for exchanging content information across Web sites. Python is an excellent tool for RSS processing, and Mike Olson and Uche Ogbuji introduce a couple of modules available for this purpose.

Fredrik Lundh's ElementTree module is an increasingly popular API for light-weight and fast manipulation of XML documents within Python. In this installment, David contrasts ElementTree with several other libraries devoted to processing XML instances as object trees, especially with his own gnosis.xml.objectify module.