Small Python from Synapse is a Big Deal

The guys from Synapse didn't appear to be at PyCon this year, but they impressed me last year with their hacking of the "Easy Button" to tweet on Twitter when the button was pressed.

It seems they are still impressing people, as they have just been awarded a SmartGrid.TMCnet.com Product of the Year award. Congratulations to them - I am sure they will be a significant Python user in future.

Python is So Versatile

Even though I use Python all the time, and I am well-connected in the Python world, so much is happening that it's difficult to stay in touch with everything Python. Taking a look at the Python Package Index, in just the last 24 hours there have been over 40 submissions. Not all of them will be new releases, but it's instructive to take a look at what's come in to PyPI as an indication of the breadth of applications in which Python is used. Rather than list all 40 submissions available from the RSS feed, let's just take a look at some of the more interesting items.

You could use the new release of Dumbo to write programs in Hadoop, the language for specifying massively parallel map-reduce computations. With AMFast you could create rich Internet applications using Flash remoting. If you wanted to write a Unix daemon in Python you could use the python-daemon library that implements PEP 3143. You could write a network time client with ntplib.

If you wanted to add automated image processing to your Django web application you could do it with django-imagekit, or you could add AJAX with Dajax. To make it useful to a broader audience you could add django-bidi-utils to handle bi-directional text.

You might want to analyze some PDF files, in which case you could use pdfminer. If you are more interested in structural bioinformatics research then Biskit might be more your cup of tea. With all this complex software flying around you might need a program to handle a structured to-do list, and Task Coach would be ready and waiting for you.

There's also a slew of Zope and Plone components to add to these already very capable systems. Python is just so versatile!

Google Busts the Web Wide Open - In Python!

Well, if ever there was a compelling reason for using Python it's probably Google App Engine. Here's the canonical "hello world" Google App:

print 'Content-Type: text/plain'
print ''
print 'Hello, world!'

Doesn't get a lot simpler than that, does it?

There's a lot behind this announcement, including a detailed description of the data store (which interestingly seems to bear the same kind of relationship to a classical relational database that Python does to statically-typed languages), access to some of the attributes of authenticated Google account users, the ability to fetch remote URLs and a startlingly straightforward way to send email.

If I were going to write another book about Python web programming I wouldn't be able to ignore this development. What a tempting idea ...

Packaging Python

There's an extensive discussion at the moment on the python-dev list about how python modules and applications should be packaged up in future. This all relates to the distutils and setuptools features, which are great when they work and horrible when they don't. There seems to be general agreement that an uninstall feature would be useful.

My own point of view is that there are different requirements for installing applications for end users and modules for developers. In the former case I believe it would nowadays be easiest and least error-prone if each (Python) application were installed with its own interpreter and all dependencies. While this seems horribly wasteful, it neatly avoids any kind of version lock-in and allows application upgrades. In the latter case then something more like the traditional setup.py install is more appropriate, and the installation probably doesn't need to be recorded in whatever mechanism the system uses to record installed applications (e.g. Add/Remove Programs under Windows).

Whatever the result, it does appear that 2.6 could get us closer to a universal solution to installation problems.

And, In Related News ... ?

So I read the output from my daily agent and it includes this gem:

PyWPS releases version 2.0.0

Turns out that even while I was blundering along completely unaware of version 1.something, the PyWPS Development Team have been slaving away to produce version 2.0! Now there's dedication.

Sorry to seem cynical. It is in fact an entirely worthy site, as a look at pywps.wald.intevation.org should convince anybody. As usual my ignorance's limits continue to widen. This strikes me as an amazing opportunity for a bright Python programmer or two to succeed. Geospatial data processing is hot right now.

I am extremely glad to hear that there is an open standard for this stuff. I don't suppose (hope springing, as it does, eternal in the human breast) that Microsoft are on board with the standard. Perhaps they already decided to just buy the committee when the votes come around.

Python Further Embedded in the Animation Industry

Python's inexorable march towards world domination* continues with the recent announcement that visual effects provider The Foundry plans to incorporate a Python programming interface into the next version of its Furnace product. The UK broadcast industry news article that brought this to my attention also (correctly) says Python is

an extensible programming language, which is becoming widely supported by other application vendors and forming the backbone of many studios pipelines

It seems that Python's origins in "computer programming for everybody" has allowed it to become a default choice for embedded scripting capabilities in many areas. It is fast becoming the standard in the film industry. It would be nice, now the secret is out, to see that industry contributing a bit more to the development of the language and its community.

* Just in case you wondered, there are no such plans!

Python Acknowledged at IEEE

The May/June edition of the prestigious Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE) magazine is a single-subject issue on the topic of Python. This is surely a recognition of the language's value to scientists, and a vindication of the work put in by scientists all over the world to apply Python to scientific tasks.

CiSE is a joint publication of the IEEE Computer Society and the American Institute of Physics. Unfortunately not all articles are available electronically to non-members.

Bet Your Business on Python

It is encouraging to see that increasingly businesses are depending on Python to give them a strategic advantage in their marketplaces. The most recent comment of note comes from yet another PyCon sponsor, ITA Software, who use Twisted quite heavily in airline scheduling applications. They are a new phenomenon to the airline business: a company that provides responsive service without the use of mainframe heavy-iron. You can read the whole eWeek article to get more context about ITA's use of Python, but the quote I liked best was from Dan Kelley, ITA's director of application integration:

"So we think, absolutely, that it's ready for prime time. What we're doing is saying to a billion-dollar business, 'Yes, we can write components in this particular programming language, and they will keep your airline running.'"

Note that ITA don't use Python exclusively, and they see one of the advantages of distributed systems as being able to choose appropriate languages for each component.. I don't believe anyone thinks Python is perfect - it's a waste of time to seek perfection in a programming language because the concept is so subjective. Just the same it's nice to see real businesses coming out with this kind of informed opinion about Python in fairly mainstream publications. Quite apart from the general advocacy benefits it is useful, among other things, as ammunition against the dynamic language bigots should any such ammunition be needed.

Python Everywhere ...

In other news, a Swiss company that sells remote sensing systems for liquid petroleum gas tanks is buying Python-based sensing equipment from a US-based company. This is probably nothing new, as the Python in question is 1.5.2, but it reminds me just how pervasive Python is becoming.

The device in question is 1.62" x 1.24" x 0.14" (41.4 x 31.4 x 3.6 mm if you must) and it runs Python!

The news about Autodek's adoption of Python for Maya now also seems to be getting around - three more news pieces listed in my Google alerts today.