Application Development in Python

[indru]

Hi all,
I am new to Python programming. I am from C,C++,Perl background. I am
quite convinced by the possibilities python as a very high level
language is offering. I am seriously thinking of using python in my
project which is to create a accounting software. First thing came to my
mind was C++ but the time required could be enormous and my people are
not ready to wait that long. The project is a medium sized one but
bigger than something like gnucash and KMyMoney2. Do any body have
experience with application development using python and their
experiences ?. Also please advice me whether Python can be used for
such purposes.
Thanks in advance
Indru

 

[vivek]

Hi all,
I am new to Python programming. I am from C,C++,Perl background. I am
quite convinced by the possibilities python as a very high level
language is offering. I am seriously thinking of using python in my
project which is to create a accounting software. First thing came to my
mind was C++ but the time required could be enormous and my people are
not ready to wait that long. The project is a medium sized one but
bigger than something like gnucash and KMyMoney2. Do any body have
experience with application development using python and their
experiences ?. Also please advice me whether Python can be used for
such purposes.
Thanks in advance
Indru

Yes you can use python for application development. I have created an
application that generated various reports, certificates, interacts with
database and provides a GUI, all in python . For GUI I used Tkinter
but you can use any other library as per your choice. I haven't done any
project like accounting package. But I am sure you can easily do that in
python and in a very less time as compared to developing that in C++.
Moreover you get os independent code free of cost with Python .

Regards
Vivek Kumar

 

[Dave Reed]

Hi all,
I am new to Python programming. I am from C,C++,Perl background. I am
quite convinced by the possibilities python as a very high level
language is offering. I am seriously thinking of using python in my
project which is to create a accounting software. First thing came to my
mind was C++ but the time required could be enormous and my people are
not ready to wait that long. The project is a medium sized one but
bigger than something like gnucash and KMyMoney2. Do any body have
experience with application development using python and their
experiences ?. Also please advice me whether Python can be used for
such purposes.
Thanks in advance
Indru

Of course!

I wrote a 24,000 Python program that uses pygtk/gnome (interfaces were
created with glade) and postgresql. It's a patient database/accounting
package for my wife's optometric office. It does double entry
accounting to handle all the monetary transactions and generate
reports for their accountant. It also keeps track of their frame
inventory, does insurance reimbursement calculations for the
insurances they accept, and many, many, other things. About 1,000 of
that 24,000 lines of code is strings that hold PostScript code for
printing out receipts, etc.

It took me about 300 hours including design time. I've got 22 years of
programming experience (the last 3.5 years almost exclusively in
Python) so YMMV on coding time. I use gnucash for my personal finances
and IMO, the system I wrote is more complex than a basic accounting
system such as gnucash (which I use for my personal finances),
although using Postgresql to store all the data greatly reduces the
amount of code you have to write to manipulate the data. So my guess
is fairly full featured accounting system could be written in less
than 24,000 lines of Python code if you use a database to store all
the actual data.

Also note that using the database for manipulating the data makes the
speed very acceptable. I'm almost certain that manipulating the data
in Python would be way too slow to make it usable (e.g., generating a
balance sheet that looks through all the transactions and groups them
by account in Python would be much slower than using sql commands to
do that).

Have fun!

Dave

 

[Dave Reed]

Dave> Also note that using the database for manipulating the data
Dave> makes the speed very acceptable. I'm almost certain that
Dave> manipulating the data in Python would be way too slow to
Dave> make it usable (e.g., generating a balance sheet that looks
Dave> through all the transactions and groups them by account in
Dave> Python would be much slower than using sql commands to do
Dave> that).

I'm not arguing that the dbase isn't the way to go, but if you wanted
to do the manipulations in python, the Numeric package certainly
provides the speed you need to manipulate large quantities of data
rapidly. I sometimes use a C extension to put data from an SQL
database directly into Numeric arrays and then manipulate the data in
python.

John Hunter

Yes, Numeric is great for numeric data. The data I have is a mix of
numeric and text data (for example, patient name, frame description,
etc.). The other benefit of using the database is it provides
automatic persistence (permanent storage) and atomic transaction
processing. And of course sql statements allow you to easily get the
data you want using joins, group by, and order by.

Dave

 

[Pedro Werneck]

I suggest you to look at Kiwi, in http://www.async.com.br/kiwi... it's
a framework for quick application development, based on PyGTK and
Glade... the stable version currently only supports GTK 1.2, but I
think it's worth a look...