Recently, I've been playing with beta builds of Komodo 4.0, ActiveState's IDE for dynamic languages. I have been using Komodo over the years for many of my Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl/Tk, and regular expression development tasks. Conveniently, I use it on most of my Windows and Linux installations, because licensing is per-person, not per installation. Komodo also runs on Mac OS X and Solaris -- the latter did, What’s new in this version of Komodo? Quite a lot, as it happens, but most of the enhancements fall under the “improved” category. What’s really new and worth considering, in my humble opinion, is the client code development support.Komodo 4.0 does JavaScript debugging using Firefox and the JavaScript DBGP extension. It also has an interactive JavaScript shell that’s available within JavaScript debugging sessions. These work well, although debugging this way slows down JavaScript execution noticeably.Komodo 4 has a local proxy server that acts as an HTTP inspector, which examines HTTP requests and responses as they happen. Komodo’s editor does auto-completes and call tips for XML and HTML, making mark-up editing almost as convenient as code editing.The IDE also has a new DOM viewer for XML and HTML documents, which provides structured document navigation in the same way that the code viewer provides structured source code file navigation. Komodo 4.0 is slated to ship next Tuesday. ActiveState Komodo 4.0 Cost: $295 Professional, $29.95 Personal Verdict: Komodo speeds up development in a number of scripting languages, even compared to the constantly improving free development environments for the individual languages. It’s worth having if you do more than occasional programming in one or more of the scripting languages that it supports. Technology Industry