plonewars.com

I never leave home without these, at least not when I leave home to do
development:

• Emacs

  Emacs of course isn’t specific to Zope or Python. Nevertheless,
  Emacs is the editor for doing Zope development. Check out
  Philipp von Weitershausen demo pdbtrack. You need nothing
  more than the usual python-mode for this. (If you don’t know
  what pdb is, read this gentle intro to debugging in Python.)

  I hear that other editors can do this too, but it can’t possibly
  work as well.

  Start with Emacs basics right now!

• PDBDebugMode

  What it does: It loads the Python Debugger (pdb) whenever Zope
  encounters an exception that was not filtered in the error_log.
  In combination with pdbtrack this means: Don’t read tracebacks to
  find out where the exception has occurred and where you might
  want to hook in to debug. And don’t restart after you figured
  out where to put that pdb.set_trace(). Instead: Have your pdb
  point to the failing line of code and do your debugging right
  away. Works similar to –debug-inplace of the Zope testrunner.

  This might be not as useful for development of new applications
  (think tests) as for situations where you have to debug something
  quickly, possibly on a live deployment.

• ScriptDebugging

  Before, I totally hated debugging code in Script (Python)
  objects. That was until I found Lennart Regebro’s
  ScriptDebugging, which helps pdbtrack find out where in the
  script you are, which means that you can debug scripts just like
  any other Python code.

• DeadlockDebugger

  Stuck with a Zope that’s stuck? If your Zope stops responding,
  use DeadlockDebugger to find out where exactly Zope’s threads are
  deadlocked. From the author:

  This product adds a hook so that a deadlocked Zope process can
  be debugged, by dumping a traceback of all running python
  processes. The dump is sent to the event log (at the DEBUG
  level) and returned to the browser (even though the Zope is
  deadlocked and doesn’t answer any other requests!).

  DeadlockDebugger can of course also be used to debug Zope in
  non-deadlock situations, when a Zope process is taking a long
  time and you wish to know what code is being executed.

What’s the Zope 2 tool that you’d take with you on an island?