in the early nineties I bought the tawk (Thompson awk) compiler and developed since than a lot of programs for my companies. The compiler produces fast reliable code and has a lot of useful extensions for the Windows environment.
Until now it worked in the W95, W2K and XP without problems but now that I have to move to W7 / 2008 Server I am in doubt if it is wise to try to continue with this although excellent but outdated and no more supported product.
My questions to you :
What can you recommend for real-world business applications (all of them run in batch mode - no GUI) ?
Has someone made a bigger transition (manual reprogramming) from xxx (here: awk) to Python ?
What Python implementation should I use ? I need fast file I/O and extensive random access to 100.000+ dictionary elements for 1.5 Mio monthly transactions
Which is the most stable version ? 2.7.x ? 3.1.x ?
Does 3.1 support Windows Automation ? I have to drive the Excel API through COM and need access to MS-SQL
And : is Python really the choice for this kind of task ?
Thank you for your honorable answersMeiki
Python is a good choice for these types of tasks. You should use Python 2.7.2 and since you are on Windows, you may want to use the Activestate Python distribution http://www.activestate.com/activepython/downloads which is standard Python bundled with a number of additional useful libraries and an easy to use package manager named PyPm.
Also, you should have a look at the slide presentations here http://www.dabeaz.com/generators/ and here http://www.dabeaz.com/generators-uk/index.html because Python generators are a powerful way to handle the same types of batch processing that AWK is used for.
As for Windows automation, the Activestate distro for Windows includes this, or you can download and install pywin separately if you are using the Python.org distro. I've used Python and COM to extract data from Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook mailboxes and Lotus Notes databases among other things.
If you want to stick with the awk style of doing things, you can write some Python helper functions so that your Python programs don't look so foreign to awk eyes. In fact, pyawk.py may already be all that you need http://pyawk.sourceforge.net/ You can download it here http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyawk/files/pyawk/pyawk-0.4/ however be warned that Python has evolved a lot since it was last updated.
Without question this is the best way to add Tawk to Django/python. It solved all my needs.
https://github.com/CleitonDeLima/django-tawkto
Related
I once read about minimal python installation without a lot of the libraries that come with the python default installation but could not find it on the web...
What I want to do is to just pack a script with the python stuff required to execute it and make portable.
Does any one know about something like that?
Thanks
Micro Python is actively maintained and has been ported to a bunch of microcontrollers.
For other small implementations, you might also want to check out tinypy or PyMite.
If you don't care about size, but really just want an easy way to distribute a python program, consider PyInstaller or one of the others on this list.
Portable python might do what you want. It's a python installation for USB thumb drives.
There's now finally Micro Python, claiming to be full reimplementation of Python 3 core, fitting even into medium-size 32bit microcontrollers. API will be different of course, so C modules will require porting. Project is funded via KickStarter, source code will be released some time after the campaign (request for consideration was made to author to not delay release of the source, to help bootstrap Micro Python community sooner).
http://micropython.org/
You can also look for already installed instances.
OpenOffice / LibreOffice
Look at the environment variable UNO_PATH or into the default install directories, for example for Windows and LO5
%ProgramFiles(x86)%\LibreOffice 5\program\python.exe
Gimp
look into the default install directories, for example for Windows
C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\Python
and so on...
So I've been using Perl for several years now and I'm starting to dabble a little in Python. Is there a sort of CPAN but for Python? What's the normal way to manage modules in Python? Any direction would be greatly appreciated. FWIW I use Linux so Windows-only solutions aren't really useful to me.
The repository formerly known as Cheese Shop.
PyPI
The Python Package Index is a repository of software for the Python programming language. There are currently 9140 packages here. To contact the PyPI admins, please use the Get help or Bug reports links.
Also, take a look at
SIG for Python Resource Cataloguing
This SIG exists in order to discuss and build a catalog of Python resources. The SIG charter is:
The Python Catalog SIG (Special Interest Group) aims at producing a master index of Python software and other resources. It will begin by figuring out what the requirements are, converging on a design for the data schema, and producing an implementation. ("Implementation" will almost certainly include mean a set of CGI scripts for browsing the catalog, and may also contain a standard library module for automatically fetching and installing modules, if the SIG decides that's a worthwhile feature.)
Check out Python eggs / easy_install
We have an existing C# project based on NHibernate and WPF. I am asked to convert it to Linux and to consider other implementation like Python. But for some reason, they like NHibernate a lot and want to keep it.
Do you know if it's possible to keep the NHibernate stuff and make it work with Python ? I am under the impression that NHibernate is glue code between C# and the DB, so can not be exported to other languages.
Alternative question: can somebody recommend a good python compatible replacement of NHibernate ? The backend DB is Oracle something.
NHibernate is not specific to C#, but it is specific to .NET.
IronPython is a .NET language from which you could use NHibernate.
.NET and NHibernate can run on Linux through Mono. I'm not sure how good Mono's support is for WPF.
I'm not sure if IronPython runs on Linux, but that would seem to be the closest thing to what you are looking for.
There is a Java version of NHibernate (said tongue in cheek) called Hibernate and there are integration points between Java and Python where Linux is very much supported.
I know the Python community has its own ORMs, but as far as I'm aware, those options are not as mature and feature rich as Hibernate/NHibernate.
I would imagine that almost all of the options available to you would support Oracle.
What about running your project under Mono on Linux? Mono seems to support NHibernate, which means you may be able to get away with out rewriting large chunks of your application.
Also, if you really wanted to get Python in on the action, you could use IronPython along with Mono.
SQLAlchemy is the most powerful ORM in Python so far.
Check out Django. They have a nice ORM and I believe it has tools to attempt a reverse-engineer from the DB schema.
I found http://www.iseriespython.com/, which is a version of Python for the iSeries apparently including some system specific data access classes. I am keen to try this out, but will have to get approval at work to do so. My questions are:
Does the port work well, or are there limits to what the interpreter can handle compared with standard Python implementations?
Does the iSeries database access layer work well, creating usable objects from table definitions?
From what I have seen so far, it works pretty well. Note that I'm using iSeries Python 2.3.3. The fact that strings are natively EBCDIC can be a problem; it's definitely one of the reasons many third-party packages won't work as-is, even if they are pure Python. (In some cases they can be tweaked and massaged into working with judicious use of encoding and decoding.) Supposedly 2.5 uses ASCII natively, which would in principle improve compatibility, but I have no way to test this because I'm on a too-old version of OS/400.
Partly because of EBCDIC and partly because OS/400 and the QSYS file system are neither Unix-like nor Windows-like, there are some pieces of the standard library that are not implemented or are imperfectly implemented. How badly this would affect you depends on what you're trying to do.
On the plus side, the iSeries-specific features work quite well. It's very easy to work with physical files as well as stream files. Calling CL or RPG programs from Python is fairly painless. On balance, I find iSeries Python to be highly usable and very worthwhile.
Update (2012): A lot of work has gone into iSeries Python since this question was asked. Version 2.7 is now available, meaning it's up-to-date as far as 2.x versions go. A few participants of the forum are reasonably active and provide amazing support. One of them has gotten Django working on the i. As expected, the move to native ASCII strings solves a lot of the EBCDIC problems and greatly increases compatibility with third-party packages. I enthusiastically recommend iSeries Python 2.7 for anyone on V5R3 or later. (I still strongly recommend iSeries Python 2.3.3 for those who are on earlier versions of the operating system.)
Update (2021): Unfortunately, iSeriesPython is no longer maintained, and the old website and forum are gone. You can still get the software from its SourceForge repository, and it is still an amazingly useful and worthwhile asset for those who are stuck on old (pre-7.2) versions of the operating system. For those who are on 7.2 or newer, there is a Python for PASE from IBM, which should be considered the preferred way to run Python on the midrange platform. This version of Python is part of a growing ecosystem of open source software on IBM i.
It sounds like it is would work as expected. Support for other libraries might be pretty limited, though.
Timothy Prickett talks about some Python ports for the iSeries in this article:
http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh041706-story02.html
Also, some discussion popped up in the Python mailing archives:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2004-January/245276.html
iSeriesPython is working very well.
We are usning it since 2005 (or earlier) in our Development and Production Environments as an utility language, for generating of COBOL source code, generating of PCML interfaces, sending SMS, validating/correcting some data ... etc.
With iSeriesPython you can access the iSeries database at 2 ways: using File400 and/or db2 module. You can execute OS/400 commands and you can work with both QSYS.LIB members and IFS stream files.
IMHO, iSeries Python is very powerful tool, more better than REXX included with iSeries.
Try it!
I got permission to install iSeries Python on a box about 3 years ago. I found that it worked pretty much as advertised. I contacted the developer and he was very good about answering questions. However, before I could think about using it in production, I had to approach the developer regarding a support contract. That really isn't his gig, so he said no and we scrapped the idea. The main limitation I found is that it is several releases behind Python on other platforms.
I have also had very good experience with Jython on the iSeries. Java is completely supported on the iSeries. Theoretically, everything you can do in RPG on the iSeries, you can do in Java, which means you can do it in Jython. I was sending email from an AS/400 (old name for iSeries) via JPython (old name for Jython) and smtplib.py in 1999 or 2000.
Another place to look is on the mailing list MIDRANGE-L or search the archives for the list at midrange.com. I know they have talked about this a while back.
I'd like to write some quick Python code to assess the CPU, memory, disk, and networking usage of my Windows XP system.
Are there existing Python libraries that would allow me to access that information? Or, are there DLL's that I can call from Python? (If so, a code sample would be appreciated)
I think WMI is the resource to use. Especially, look at the Win32_PerfFormattedData* classes in the MSDN.
A quick search turned this up (among others):
http://timgolden.me.uk/python/wmi.html
The MS Scriptomatic tool can generate WMI scripts in Python as well as VBScript, JScript and Perl.