Best Python packages?

[Iain King]

On Jul 18, 11:23 am, Ben Sizer <kylo... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jul 16, 3:31 pm, Fredrik Lundh <fred... at pythonware.com> wrote:
>
> > Ben Sizer wrote:
> > > make my development a lot easier.
>
> > Knowing what kind of development you do might help, of course.  Some
> > libraries are excellent in some contexts and suck badly in others...
>
> Sure. Mostly I'm just interested in what's out there though. In C++
> you have Boost which everybody knows are a source of high quality
> libraries, covering a fairly wide set of applications. Obviously
> that's more low-level and less application specific, and the Python
> standard libs do pretty much everything that is in Boost, but it's
> that sort of peer-reviewed and widely-applicable list that I'd like to
> see.
>
> I (attempt to) use TurboGears for web development and that depends on
> a whole bunch of libraries - SQLObject, PyProtocols, RuleDispatch,
> SimpleJson, FormEncode, etc - and I would never have heard of these if
> TurboGears' exposure of its internals wasn't so common. Some of these
> are web-specific but some are not. And I'd never know to look for them
> specificially, because in many cases it wouldn't occur to me that they
> exist. (eg. Object-Relational Mappers like SQLObject may be obvious if
> you come from certain areas of IT, but I'd never heard of them before
> I started with TurboGears.)
>
> For what it's worth, my main areas of interest are gaming, multimedia,
> and web development. But I just like to hear about anything that
> people might use which makes their life a lot easier and which perhaps
> is not application specific - like ORMs or something similar.
>
> > Looking at things that larger projects and distributions use can also be
> > a good idea.  For example, if you're doing scientific stuff, go directly
> > to enthought.com.  If you're doing web stuff, look at the libraries big
> > Django applications use.  Etc.
>
> Sadly, I know just as little about what major applications are out
> there as I do about what libraries are out there!
>
> --
> Ben Sizer

Well, if you're looking for a list of excellent 3rd party Python
libraries, then I can give you the ones I like and use a lot:
wxPython :      powerful GUI library which generates native look &
feel
PIL :           Imaging Library - if you need to manipulate bitmaps
pyGame :        SDL for python
BeautifulSoup : for real-world (i.e. not-at-all-recommendation-
compliant) HTML processing

Iain