Now that ZEO is free and open, there's no reason not to use it to make development easier - ZEO users don't have to stop publishing to connect to the database in a debugger or interactive Python session. Just install the server and client in the same Zope installation tree (that is, install Zope, then install ZEO on top of it, and start both the server and the client from that same tree), and keep your old start scripts if you want to change back.