Help: Python for a big commercial project?

Graham Dumpleton grahamd at dscpl.com.au
Wed Apr 10 23:20:36 EDT 2002


"Cereal Muesli" <cereal_con_fibra at hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1018437980.14078.python-list at python.org>...
> 	I need a piece of advice from you, Oh wise Pythoneers! 8-)
> 
>   I'm involved in the development of a big DataWarehouse for an important 
> TelCo, and I want to propose Python as
>   the language of choice for internal maintenance tasks, high level control 
> tasks for the loading procedures, etc...
>   the people here is not likely to use any free stuff for "serious" 
> development (you know...no money = no quality, sigh!),
>   but i want to change this, since I believe that Python is really a very 
> good product. I have played with Python for
>   a year or so under Windows, and before trying to convince people here that 
> it is a good choice, I need to know
>   some things:

Perhaps if you can point at another Telco where Python is being used. I
will not name names, but a certain almost monopolistic telco in Australia
(not hard to work out who :-)) uses Python in some OSS, NMS and TMS
applications which help to monitor and manage their international telephone
switches and associated equipment. Aspects of the TMS application amounted
to a data warehouse as it stored the last few months worth of call records
for all phone calls going in, out or through the country through that telco.

Not everything is Python as the core infrastructure is written in C++. What
has been done is that Python wrappers have been added to a distributed
messaging infrastructure to allow parts to be written in Python. One way in
which this is used is for high level control and maintenance tasks. Python is
also being used for writing some GUIs as well.

> - First of all; do you think that Python is suitable for this
>   kind of "serious, big" project?

As far as using it as the glue to help manage the system and perhaps
to build some components then yes, as to using it for practically
everything, possibily no, this being for reasons political and depending
on what you are doing perhaps also technical. You really need to have
good management support and good technical people who can show how
the technology can be used effectively to give management a good sense
they are doing the right thing.
 
> - At least two of the candidate modules to be developed in
>   Python require a GUI under X Windows.

In the telco mentioned above, for those areas where Python was used
for GUIs, the Pmw (http://pmw.sourceforge.net) module was used. In
fact, this is where the Pmw module was first created and developed
before it was released on the Internet. Ie., the Pmw module has telco
grade breeding. :-)

> - Database access would be required for some data analysys
>   modules, specifically ORACLE 8 access would definitely be a
>   requirement

Database access was done through a slightly modified version of one
of the Oracle modules for Python. This was in some applications only
though, as there were also Oracle interfaces in C++ using OCI which
were accessible over a distributed messaging system.

In respect of the C++ core of these applications, the OSE C++ class
library was used. The distributed messaging system and Python wrappers
were developed in house, however, in the past couple of years, an
equivalent distributed messaging system has been added to OSE. This
includes Python wrappers for the distributed messaging system as well
as a HTTP servlet framework and XML-RPC and SOAP gateways. Included
with OSE are also examples of how to create database query agents which
adhere to the Python database API. In short, OSE provides a framework
which is quite capable of being used in a telco setting and which has
proven itself to be robust enough for that sort of environment.

For more information on OSE, check out:

  http://ose.sourceforge.net

It may especially be worthwhile browsing the Python manual and the
examples presented on the web site.



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