Michael R. Copeland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have some questions about the suitability of Python for some > applications I've developed in C/C++. These are 32 bit Console > applications, but they make extensive use of STL structures and > functions (Lists, Maps, Vectors, arrays) - primarily because the data > volume is high (2,500,000+ records).
This is all bread and butter stuff to python and 10 times easier to do in python than C++! > The main thing I'd like to do is port one part of the system that has > a series of user menus and works with several text data files (one > _very_ large). I'm not using any database system, just my home-grown > indexed sequential file database. There's nothing but volume that > precludes this application from running from almost any text file- > processing language system (e.g. Perl, BASIC, etc.). > From what little I've seen of Python, it appears I could port this > application to Python code, but I'd do so only if I could: > 1. Integrate it into a Web application in such a way that the user > could select it as an option from a main page and have it execute as a > WEB GUI application. Currently, the application's interface is only a > crude DOS window. A web application is possible. You can start your application which would run its own embedded web server which the user could then control. Python has a web server in the standard library. I've done exactly this using cherrypy as a simple web application framework. The asynchronous nature of web applications are often a pain. You could write a windows GUI using TKinter (which comes with python) or WxPython (which doesn't). Those toolkits make it very easy to make GUI applications. > 2. Assure that the performance isn't totally crippled by using Python, > an interpretted language. While I don't expect native C/C++ > performance, I don't want to be embarrassed... Depends exactly what you are doing. If you are IO limited then Python is just as fast as C++. If you are doing lots of calculation on the data then python can be slow. You can use the numpy library which is a library of scientific maths routines all coded in C for speed which is very quick. http://numpy.scipy.org http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy > 3. Make sure that the volume of stored data (2.5+ million records) can > be accommodated in Python structures (I don't know enough about Python > to answer this question...). I wouldn't have thought that would be a problem. > Note that I'm not considering using the existing C/C++ code in my Web > application, because I don't know how to write a C/C++ Windows > application - and I'm sure the learning curve here is greater than > Python's. You could always use ctypes from python to interface with your C code. If you can export your code in a DLL then ctypes can use it. (Not sure about C++ though) > I'm a very old procedural-based application developer (47+ > years of programming experience), and developing Windows applications is > beyond me. > So, I only (?) want to take an existing application that uses a large > text file (and several smaller text indexing files) and put it into a > Web system I already have. I feel Python (or Perl) is(are) my best > option(s), and here I'm only looking for some initial guidance from the > Python users. TIA Go for it! Python is such an easy language to write stuff in (escpecially compared to C++) that you'll have the prototype done very quickly and you can evaluate the rest of your concerns with working code! -- Nick Craig-Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
