Pylint is a good python code checking tool.  Pydev is a good plugin for Eclipse for editing and running python programs.  Much of this info is taken from Ryan Fraser's page .  Wolfgang has an alternative description for installing pylint in the Komodo python IDE here

This setup guide for downloading GeoNetwork using Subversion, building using Maven 2, developing, deploying and debugging on Tomcat and Eclipse on Windows 7 64-bit still uses the MckoiDB and should be updated to use MySQL.

Introduction

This document was developed for GeoNetwork’s new Maven 2 based setup. See http://trac.osgeo.org/geonetwork/wiki/Maven for more information.

Note that several installation and configuration options may not be necessary for GeoNetwork development but can be necessary for other software development projects.

This document was compiled from experiments, notes, and web sites by the following contributors and sources (in alphabetical order):

Tomcat kept running out of memory when running it as a service from within Eclipse. Following is a solution:

Double-click on your Tomcat service under the Servers tab, and click on the "Open launch configuration" to open the Tomcat launch configuration window. On the Arguments tab, append the two following lines in the "VM arguments" form window:

-XX:MaxPermSize=128m
-Xmx1024m

How-to on running Tomcat within Eclipse:

• Eclipse Help: Creating a server
• IBM: Developing Web applications with Tomcat and Eclipse