what is python?

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Johnston <johnston.p at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> Hello people.

Hi Paul, welcome to this newsgroup. I replied to your post on comp.lang.xml
(in a thread about Python) and now you're here, cool! :)

[snip]

> So what are people using python for?  What types of problems is python
> better suited relative to, say, java?  I do alot of server-side programming
> & xml stuff.

People use Python for lots of things. I haven't used Java myself (though I
have used C++ so I'd be up to speed with Java quickly enough), so it's 
hard for me to compare the two. I'll just describe what I do with Python:

I use Python at work for primarily two things:

* Scripting around databases (for conversion etc)

I've used Python a lot to manipulate databases (through ODBC). It's very
easy to write a script that talks to a database through SQL. Python is
good at working with data; its list and dictionary constructs make
life very easy. Python can also easily send off emails or talk to an
FTP server, so the scripts can fetch their data by themselves and mail
people when they're done.
 
* Web publishing with Zope

Something quite different (though one can talk to databases with Zope as well)
is Zope. Zope is a web application platform written in (mostly) Python, and
is flexible and powerful, see http://www.zope.org

I'm currently investigating how to best integrate some XML code I wrote
(in Python, using the XML-sig libraries) into Zope.

During play, I also use Python for:

* Interfacing with lots of neat stuff. GUIs, libraries for all kinds of things.

* Prototyping neat stuff. One can write something new very quickly, without
getting lost in designing interfaces for all your classes (I always get
stranded there in C++ -- designing classes can be fun, but it gets old
after a while if you don't get your application to actually do something :)

I'm planning some apps that will have everything not speed critical (which
is a lot; GUI, analysis, loading/saving) in Python, with only the core
in C or C++ for speed when necessary.

Regards,

Martijn