Python IDE Suggestions

Quantopian's community platform is shutting down. Please read this post for more information and download your code.

Back to Community

Python IDE Suggestions

posted Jun 15, 2014

Hello,

I love the Quantopian's concept but I am really struggling to develop with the online web-based IDE, all developers know how picky we are about our IDEs. Is there any way to do offline development? or any plan to implement a plugin for Intellij Idea or Eclipse so we could do offline development and backtest when needed online?

I constantly have problem with the auto-complete, on my Ubuntu with firefox the autocomplete doesnt work at all I have to use Chrome, I am also not used to the style of the documentation. A standard API doc would be nicer where I could click on the types and navigate on the API documentation. Right now it is a mixture of tutorial and API specification. It would be nice to split it API and tutorials.

Besides that it looks great!
Nice work.

Cheers,
Lucas

3 responses

Hi Lucas,

Are you familiar with Zipline? We open-sourced our backtesting engine so you can run the code locally on your machine, and if you're adventurous, you can submit PR's for code improvements and functionality. We use Zipline to power the IDE available on our platform.

The code repository is available on Github and there is a Google group to support discussions. When you're ready, you can bring your strategy over to our IDE. We're working on making it easier to port strategies from your local machine to the IDE, and Thomas recently posted a blog post of the recent updates: http://blog.quantopian.com/unifying-zipline-quantopian/

Take a look and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts/suggestions for making it easier to develop offline.

Enjoy!
Alisa

Disclaimer

The material on this website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or a recommendation or endorsement for any security or strategy, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services by Quantopian. In addition, the material offers no opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or specific investment. No information contained herein should be regarded as a suggestion to engage in or refrain from any investment-related course of action as none of Quantopian nor any of its affiliates is undertaking to provide investment advice, act as an adviser to any plan or entity subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended, individual retirement account or individual retirement annuity, or give advice in a fiduciary capacity with respect to the materials presented herein. If you are an individual retirement or other investor, contact your financial advisor or other fiduciary unrelated to Quantopian about whether any given investment idea, strategy, product or service described herein may be appropriate for your circumstances. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal. Quantopian makes no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the views expressed in the website. The views are subject to change, and may have become unreliable for various reasons, including changes in market conditions or economic circumstances.

Hi,
I want to pick up this topic again. Yes, we can install zipline to local IDE and that works.

However, for backtesting environment, including data feed, like these:

from quantopian.pipeline import Pipeline
from quantopian.pipeline.data.builtin import USEquityPricing
from quantopian.pipeline.factors import ExponentialWeightedMovingAverage, EWMA
from quantopian.pipeline.factors.morningstar import MarketCap
from quantopian.research import run_pipeline
...

They are only available in the IDE.

Another example, I want to play with the fetch_csv method to test my own data, I have to do it in the IDE, and within this method?

def initialize(context):
...

I can't even test it in the Notebook env.
Correct me if I am wrong on the above 2 statements.

As Lucas mentioned, no matter how powerful Quantopian' IDE is, it is probably quite a large distance from IDE like PyCharm (IntelliJ). There are just way too many limitations. Another quick example, I can't even maximize the code window? At least 1/3 of browser screen real estate is used for something else, that is not very productive.

I do like Quantopian a lot!

Kevin

hi colleagues,
it`s very interesting question. as i understood, Quantopian performs computational environment for running of user code. May be it is a docker container. If so, Quantopian may give access to this environment throw SSH/SFTP . and Pycharm can handle with it. It will copy user code to environment and run. So, user will work in Pcharm and Quantopian will get his code. Win/win.

You've successfully submitted a support ticket.

Our support team will be in touch soon.

Need help? Contact support.

The material on this website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or a recommendation or endorsement for any security or strategy, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services by Quantopian.

In addition, the material offers no opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or specific investment. No information contained herein should be regarded as a suggestion to engage in or refrain from any investment-related course of action as none of Quantopian nor any of its affiliates is undertaking to provide investment advice, act as an adviser to any plan or entity subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended, individual retirement account or individual retirement annuity, or give advice in a fiduciary capacity with respect to the materials presented herein. If you are an individual retirement or other investor, contact your financial advisor or other fiduciary unrelated to Quantopian about whether any given investment idea, strategy, product or service described herein may be appropriate for your circumstances. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal. Quantopian makes no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the views expressed in the website. The views are subject to change, and may have become unreliable for various reasons, including changes in market conditions or economic circumstances.

About Quantopian

The material on this website is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or a recommendation or endorsement for any security or strategy, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services by Quantopian.

In addition, the material offers no opinion with respect to the suitability of any security or specific investment. No information contained herein should be regarded as a suggestion to engage in or refrain from any investment-related course of action as none of Quantopian nor any of its affiliates is undertaking to provide investment advice, act as an adviser to any plan or entity subject to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as amended, individual retirement account or individual retirement annuity, or give advice in a fiduciary capacity with respect to the materials presented herein. If you are an individual retirement or other investor, contact your financial advisor or other fiduciary unrelated to Quantopian about whether any given investment idea, strategy, product or service described herein may be appropriate for your circumstances. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal. Quantopian makes no guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the views expressed in the website. The views are subject to change, and may have become unreliable for various reasons, including changes in market conditions or economic circumstances.