Python in the enterprise

Daniel G. Shafer Builder.com

Published: 09 Jul 2002 12:06 BST

Python is one of those intriguing anomalies of software development: a language that's often viewed as strictly a "glue" scripting language despite the fact that it's clearly powerful enough for industrial-strength software development.

While Python is often evaluated against Perl as a scripting language particularly suited to Internet applications, it's building a buzz in the large-scale software development space. It can be characterised as:

Object-oriented
Interpreted
Interactive
Modular
Dynamic
High-level
Portable
Extensible in C and C++

Python incorporates modules, exceptions, dynamic typing, very high-level dynamic data types, and classes. It has interfaces to many system calls and libraries, as well as to various Windows-based systems.

If Python has failed to penetrate any specific arena of computing, it's in enterprise development shops, where Python is still viewed as just an alternative scripting language to Perl. This article provides a brief assessment of why Python may or may not work in the construction of enterprise-scale applications.

The pros
Some of Python's features that make it a reasonable candidate for use in enterprise applications are:

Free availability (like Perl, Python is open source).
Stability (Python is in release 2.2 at this point and, as I noted earlier, is older than Java).
Good support for objects, modules, and other reusability mechanisms.
Easy integration with and extensibility using C and Java.

While these capabilities represent common arguments for using Python in the enterprise, there are some other sound reasons that receive less attention.