Using Python after a few years of Ruby

[laplacian42 at gmail.com]

On Apr 14, 3:01 am, blahemailb... at gmail.com wrote:
>
> 1) Rake - is there an equivalent of Rake? I've seen a bit about SCons,
> and it looks really nice, but it seems geared towards being a Make
> replacement for C/C++ rather than something that's used to work with
> Python itself. Is there anything like a Python build tool? (Or do I
> even need something like that? I haven't worked with any large Python
> systems, just little things here and there.)

If the things you need automated aren't *too* complex, you'd be remiss
if you didn't at least have a 2nd look at good old GNU make.

> 2) Gems - I've seen a bit about Eggs, but they don't seem to have
> anywhere near the official status gems do for Ruby. Are there any
> "package management" things like this for Python, or do you usually
> just grab the code you need as-is?

Go have a look at the [PyPI](http://pypi.python.org/pypi) for
packages, download them, and install them using the standard distutils
`python setup.py install` command. This puts packages into your
python's `site-packages` dir.

You can also use the whole eggs/easy_install/setuptools thing, but I
prefer the simpler standard method just described.

> 3) Web frameworks - yeah, I realize there are tons of these, but are
> TurboGears, Django, and Zope still the big ones? I've seen a lot about
> Pylons, is that a separate framework or is it a ... well, frame that
> other things are built on? (TG seems to be related to Pylons at a
> glance?)

Django has a lot of steam.

> 4) Unit Test frameworks - If there's a behavioral test suite like
> RSpec that's be awesome, but I'd be happy to settle for a good, solid
> unit testing system.

I'd look at the standard doctest module: http://docs.python.org/library/doctest.html