Python for win32 development, GUI, Database, dlls

[Remco Gerlich]

I see this a week late, but it seems you didn't get many answers.

Karel van der Walt <kvdwalt at csir.co.za> wrote in comp.lang.python:
> I have been approached in a 'time to market situation'.
> 
> Python appears to me to be a strategic choice, however:
> 
> this is a number crunching application most numeric stuff in existing
> (fortran) dll
> the new development will entail a lot of visualization, pseudo GIS like,
> animation (coloring of contours), plain media (digital picures, video) in
> a rich interactive GUI
> 
> then all of this data in MS Access (what else?), with reports and graphs on
> top of it. OK the latter can be in a reportwriter as long as one can call an
> .exe with commandline parms from python) Integration with MS Office formats
> (not ole automation) would be important (thus MS Access for imports
> exports).
> 
> Any grave misgivings?

You need to glue a lot of things together. That's where Python should shine.

> Any pointers?

Let's see, the number crunching is in an existing Fortran program, so you
need to interact with that. Pyfortran is supposed to do that (I never used
it myself, last time the Fortran program had an output file that the script
parsed): http://pyfortran.sourceforge.net .

You may or may not need NumPy to do number crunching in Python (probably
not).

For visualization, VTK is very powerful, and scriptable with Python.
http://www.kitware.com/vtk.html . You can do animation and contour colouring
with it. VTK is cool.

For displaying/editing images, the Python Imaging Library might be needed,
http://www.pythonware.com/pil/

For plain video I don't know of any Python options. Probably you can control
Windows media player through COM, or something like that.

There are quite a few options for making a GUI, not going to list them.

You can control MS Access from Python using COM (see the book "Programming
Python on Win32" for a good explanation). But I believe that's the same as
Ole, isn't it? I'm not a Windows man, don't know if there are other options.

> Commercial libraries? However the exchange rate doesn't favour that :(

Everything above is open source.

-- 
Remco Gerlich