John French wrote:
I've been interested in Python for a while now but haven't had an opportunity to use / learn it. I'm tasked now with a project at work that might be my first opportunity.It sounds like an ideal project, and either approach would work. The advantage to avoiding ODBC is that you won't experience any non-local driver limitations which might or might not otherwise bite you in the ass (my PostgreSQL experience is rather limited).
I have to write a ~75 concurrent user document storage app. that allows users to scan documents from locally attached scanners and save to a database for retrieval. I also need to be able to call MS Word with templates and allow the user to save the file to the database. I think I understand that I can interface MS COM for these, correct?
My interest is in using FreeBSD/Postgresql/Python as a back end and a Python GUI app on the XP workstations. I'm going to end up adding some non-database functionality to the project in the future that precludes only using odbc to the database. I'll likely end up with some form of inter-user messaging being incorporated before it's over. Is it better to write one server side socket app to handle everything or start via odbc and necessary server side apps later? If anyone can tell me if this project seems appropriate to Python and offer suggestions as to an initial architecture, I'd appreciate it. I'm quite interested in the RAD aspect of the language but quite lost at the moment. (I did just sign up for the Tutor mailing list).
Look at the Pyrex package to get you started thinking about remote execution and client/server communications. This lets a program on one machine call methods on objects on another machine.
I'm sure you'll get other suggestions as well, but that'll get you started thinking pythonically.
regards Steve -- Steve Holden http://www.holdenweb.com/ Python Web Programming http://pydish.holdenweb.com/ Holden Web LLC +1 703 861 4237 +1 800 494 3119 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
