18 May 2009 · applications, bioinformatics, django, flash, pdf, plone, python, zope

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!