What is Python?

Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively.

PythonFeatures

  • Powerful and fast. Python lets you write the code you need, quickly. And, thanks to a highly optimized byte compiler and support libraries, Python code runs more than fast enough for most applications.
  • Runs everywhere. Python is available for all major operating systems: Windows, Linux/Unix, OS/2, Mac, Amiga, among others.
  • Easily integrated. Python can integrate with .COM, .NET, and .CORBA objects. There are implementation of Python for Java libraries and for .NET objects. Python is also supported for the Internet Communications Engine (ICE) and for many other integration technologies.
  • Clear & readable syntax. That is why Python is friendly and easy to learn. Python developer and user community maintains a wiki, hosts international and local conferences, runs development sprints, and contributes to online code repositories.
  • Freely usable and distributable. The Python implementation is under an open source license that makes it freely usable. Python is free to use, even for commercial products, because of its OSI-approved open source license.

Historical Background

Python was created in the early 1990s by Guido van Rossum at Stichting Mathematisch Centrum in the Netherlands as a successor of a language called ABC. Guido remains Python’s principal author, although it includes many contributions from others. In 1995, Guido continued his work on Python at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives in Reston, Virginia where he released several versions of the software.

In May 2000, Guido and the Python core development team moved to BeOpen.com to form the BeOpen PythonLabs team. In October of the same year, the PythonLabs team moved to Digital Creations. In 2001, the Python Software Foundation was formed, a non-profit organization created specifically to own Python-related Intellectual Property. Zope Corporation is a sponsoring member of the PSF.

Python software

Python is one of the powerful dynamic programming languages, which is widely used for developing various web systems, including:

Saleor Saleor

Discover one of the best e-commerce software platforms built with a Django framework and available on an open-source basis.

Data exploration and visualization with Caravel

Caravel is Python-based open-source platform for data exploration, discovery, and collaborative analytics. This platform is interactive and intuitive, easily processes and visualizes data.

wger - Python workout manager

wger is a free and open source workout, exercises and nutrition manager. This application is written in Python, offers smooth performance and easy mobile-friendly user interface.

Folium: Python data for maps

Folium is a powerful Python library that visualizes data manipulated in Python on maps with choropleth visualizations and Vincent/Vega markers.

Webrecorder: web archiving service

Webrecorder provides an integrated Python-based platform for creating high-fidelity, verifiable, standards compliant web archives while browsing and sharing archived content.

Kinto - lightweight JSON storage service

Kinto is an open source JSON storage service that offers synchronisation and sharing features. It is lightweight, implemented in Python and built using Cliquet.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an open source software library aimed at machine learning and numerical computation using data flow graphs for different types of perceptual and language understanding tasks.

NLTK - Python input to the language processing

The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a uniform toolkit for building Python programs to work in the area of symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP) (e.g. tokenization, classification, tagging, stemming, parsing, and semantic reasoning).

Atomic Structure Analysis in Python with DiffPy project

DiffPy is a free and open source library of Python software modules targeted at the study of atomic structure of materials and analysis of diffraction data. The project contains DiffPy-CMI Complex Modeling framework or storage and manipulation of structure data and calculation of structure-based quantities.

Zulip - powerful open source group chat

Zulip is an open source group chat app that features threaded conversations, syntax highlighting, built-in markup, integrations with such services as Asana, Basecamp, Github, etc. This projects uses Django, Python, JavaScript, and PostgreSQL database.

Vumi - mobile messaging engine

Vumi is an open source mobile messaging platform written in Python that delivers SMS, Star Menu and instant chat messages.

Open-source e-commerce with Shuup

Shuup is an open-source scalable e-commerce platform for B2C and B2B shops. This secure and rich featured solution is built with Python and Django.

Ibis: Big Data with Python

Ibis is a Python big data framework that offers a 100% Python end-to-end user workflows and scalability for big data.

Python web application framework BlueBream

BlueBream is a free and open-source web application server, framework and library written in Python that provides a component architecture, transactional object database, tightly integrated security model and many other features.

Chameleon template engine for Python

Chameleon is an HTML/XML template engine for Python. It is a fast page template implementation which compiles markup templates into Python byte-code. Chameleon is the default template engine for the Pyramid framework. It is also often used with Zope, Django, Plone and Grok projects.

ERP5: advanced with Python and Zope

ERP5 is an Enterprise Resource Planning software that provides customers with powerful, agile and scalable solution. It works with several business planning sections: accounting, product design, production, customer relationship management, trade, warehouse management, shipping, invoicing, human resource management, and project management.

Open Source Q&A with Python and Django

OSQA stands for Open Source Question and Answer. It is a free and open source Q&A system that provides reliable and scalable core features. This software is written in Python and powered by the Django web framework.

MediaDrop: Run a video website built in Python

MediaDrop (previously MediaCore CE) is an open source online video platform that provides delivery and management of video, audio and podcasts. It features impressive accessibility and scalability, a high degree of control over the resources presentation and administration, statistics and commenting. MediaDrop is a Python application built atop the Django framework, integrates with MySQL and PostgreSQL, works with both HTML5 and Flash video players.

Load testing with Python and Locust

Locust.io is an open source Python-based user load testing tool. This lightweight, distributed and scalable framework helps to figure out how many concurrent users a system can handle by writing test scenarios in Python code.

Taiga.io Python-based agile project management platform

Taiga is a free and open source project management platform aimed at agile developers and designers. It is written in Python and built on top of Django and AngularJS. Taigo.io features Kanban and Scrum template, backlog, sprints, custom reports and virtual project video conferencing room.

Python web servers

Here we examine several open source web servers written in Python. They are: Gunicorn, Twisted Web, Chaussette, as well as WSGI servers from Tornado, CherryPy, and Waitress.

Online Python interpreters

There are situations when you do not want to install Python on your computer and need tools that will enable you to run Python scripts online. This is a list of online Python tools that can be useful for you.

Fabric: Streamline with Python

Fabric is a Python library and command-line tool. It provides a basic suite of operations for interacting with SSH and computer systems in order to automate a wide range of tasks from application deployment to general system (and server) administration tasks.

Askbot - Q&A forum using Python and Django

AskBot is a free and open source Question & Answer forum web application written in Python and Django. It offers functionality similar to StackOverflow: Q&A workflow, voting, karma, content moderation, email alert system, and many more.

Zato and Python: orchestrate integration and much more

Zato is an open source Python-based middleware platform and backend application server. It was designed as an agile ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) aimed at building systems of systems either on-premise or in the cloud. Zato provides SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), REST (Representational State Transfer), APIs and cloud integration, as well as back-end services exposure to front-end clients.

Python testing with nose

nose makes testing for Python easier. It is a fairly well known Python discovery-based unittest extension that can run doctests, unittests, “no boilerplate” tests and provides xUnits, generators and fixtures.

Alerta: alert monitoring in Python

Alerta is an open source scalable monitoring tool that is written in Python, easily configured, accepts alerts from any source, correlates and de-duplicates them, and then presents alerts via an API.

Transifex: not just another translation tool

Transifex is a web-based localization management platform for collecting, translating and delivering software products and supporting content. It was written using Django and Python, is offered as a software as a service.

Nimbus: cloud computing for science

Nimbus is an open-source toolkit focused on providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities to the scientific community. It is written in Python and Java for rapid development of custom community-specific solutions.

Better products management and tracking with Apache Bloodhound

Apache Bloodhound is an open source web-based project management and bug tracking system. It was built on top of Trac using Python and Bootstrap. This software development collaboration tool features multiple products hosting, enhanced full-text search, and user-friendly design.

Python distribution: Anaconda

Anaconda is a free enterprise-ready Python distribution with more than 195 Python packages for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing, including NumPy, SciPy, Netcdf4, Spyder, Matplotlib, Pandas, IPython, Matplotlib, Numba, Blaze, Bokeh and many others.

What is ERPNext?

ERPNext is an open source web-based system aimed at small and medium sized businesses. It assists companies with accounting, human resource management, sales, purchase, inventory, CRM, administration, project and task management, manufacturing, and even website. ERPNext is built using Python, Frappe, and MySQL.

Viewflow

Viewflow is a reusable workflow library that is Python/Django-friendly, easily customizable and ready to use. It provides explicit, multi-user, static workflow with support for parallel tasks execution and complex split/joins.

Build games with Cocos2d

Cocos2d is an open source software framework that is used to build games, apps and other cross-platform GUI-based interactive programs. It is written in Python using pyglet library and features flow control, fast and easy sprites, big number of transitions, actions that allow you to animate quicker, and access to OpenGL functionality.

GeoDjango: improve with geospatial data

GeoDjango is a set of extensions to Django that provides geographic models, database APIs, functions, and utilities to easily incorporate geospatial data inside your web portal or create rich geographic web apps.

Translate on the web with Weblate

Weblate is a free feature rich web-based translation tool written in Python on the basis of Django web framework. Weblate’s main features are: Git integration, effective user interface, automatic linking to source files, propagation of translations across subprojects, and quality checks.

FlaskBB forum software

FlaskBB is a lightweight forum software written in Python using the micro framework Flask.

Knowledge Management Key (KMKey)

Knowledge Management Key (KMKey) is a web based open source knowledge management software written mostly in Python that allows users to plan and manage projects, follow any Quality Management System, maintain department and manage tickets.

Pootle

Pootle is an online translation and localization tool that features terminology extraction, glossary, goals, statistics, user management, and error checks. It focuses on quality and enables both on-line and offline translation. Pootle was written in Python programming language using the Django framework.

Invenio

Invenio is a free and open source software suite for management of digital library or document repository on the web. Functionality includes data acquisition, classification, indexing, storage, release, and distribution. It uses Apache/WSGI, Python, and MySQL.

SQLAlchemy

SQLAlchemy high performing and accurate Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper (ORM) for working with relational databases, using the Python DBAPI for database interactivity.

Manage processes with Circus

Circus is a robust process and socket manager developed using Python and ZeroMQ to run, control and monitor processes and sockets.

SCons: efficient software build tool in Python

SCons is an open source computer software construction tool implemented in Python with automatic detection of source code file dependencies, MD5 signatures, and built-in support for C, C++, Objective-C, D, Yacc, Java, Qt, Fortran, Lex, and SWIG, as well as TeX and LaTeX documents.

IPython is more than just Python

IPython is an interactive shell for Python that provides enhanced introspection, additional shell syntax, flexible debugging, case-sensitive tab completion, parallel computing, etc.

Ansible: Python makes apps and systems easier to deploy

Ansible is a simple open-source software automation platform in Python that takes care of application deployment, configuration management, task execution, and multi-node orchestration. Ansible Playbook for automated deployment of Plone servers was introduced recently.

Pyjs: apps for desktop and browser with Python

Pyjs (also known as Pyjamas) is a development platform for creating rich client-side applications that can in a web browser and as a standalone desktop application. Pyjs includes: a stand-alone Python-to-JavaScript compiler, an AJAX widget toolkit and a Widget Set API.

SecureDrop - Python whistleblower platform

SecureDrop is an open source whistleblower platform developed mainly in Python and designed to securely accept documents from and communicate with anonymous sources.

Django Fiber - simple CMS on Python

Fiber is a friendly open source CMS for all your django projects that provides easy frontend administration and doesn’t get in your way and is built on JavaScript and Python

Exceeding OpenERP: Odoo with Python

Odoo (formerly OpenERP) is a suite of open source business Python apps that help in managing businesses and organizations using CMS, a fully-functional eCommerce, a Business Intelligence engine, etc.

Windmill: writing tests in Python

Windmill is a web testing framework that provides complete testing automation and strong debugging capabilities, tests can be written Python, JavaScript, and Ruby.

Kotti: Python-based CMS solution

Kotti is a web application framework that includes full-featured CMS that uses a set of reliable tools like Python, Pyramid, SQLAlchemy, Colander, and Deform.

FreeNAS: Python way for NAS

FreeNAS - a free and open-source Python/Django software based on FreeBSD and the ZFS file system that enables users to build network-attached-storage (NAS) on nearly any hardware platform.

Tryton: high-level application platform

Tryton is a three-tier high-level general purpose application platform written in Python, usually used as a core base for an Enterprise resource planning (ERP) business solutions.

Ninja-IDE - flexible Python editor

Ninja-IDE is an open source cross-platform integrated development environment that focuses on Python at first but has support for code highlighting for various languages.

Django REST Framework

Django REST framework is an open source, flexible and fully-featured library with modular and customizable architecture that aims at building sophisticated web APIs and uses Python and Django.

Quokka CMS

Quokka is a flexible and modular CMS powered by Python, Flask, and MongoDB.

Radicale - a simple calendar and contact server

Radicale is a simple CalDAV (calendar) and CardDAV (contact) server solution written in Python for clients like Mozilla Thunderbird with Lightning extension, Evolution, KDE KOrganizer, iPhone, etc.

Mercurial - Python version control system

Mercurial is free version control tool based on the distributed model written in Python. It is quite simple in usage, but its features include high performance and scalability, decentralized and collaborative development, and advanced branching and merging capabilities.

Isso a commenting server

Combination of CSS, Python and Javascript resulted into quick and handy self-hosted сommenting server - Isso

Booktype gives books a new perspective

Booktype is an open source software built on top of the Django web framework for authoring, editing, and publishing books to PDF, ePub, .mobi,ODT, and HTML, or export to Amazon, iBooks, Lulu.com, and other print-on-demand or ebook stores.

Ferris: specially for App Engine

Ferris is flexible and mature open source MVC framework that simplifies the process of App Engine application development in Python.

Robust web application server Substance D

Substance D is a web application server written in Python with stable and refined management interface (SDI) that can be quickly built for custom user experience.

Pylint - Python code analyzer

Pylint is a Python code analyzer that looks for the source code bug and programming errors, enforces coding standard and aims at improving code quality.

Learning Python

Python is easy and powerful programming language with elegant syntax and object-oriented approach to technology. It is cross-platform, as it runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, and Mac OS X. There is a need for comprehensive introduction to the Python programming language, starting from beginners with no previous programming experience.

Python Unit Testing - Why Do It?

learn more about Python unit testing, unit testing frameworks PyUnit, Nose and doctest modules and the best techniques stubs, mocks

Flask Python Framework

A micro framework, written in Python, easy to extend with comprehensive documentation

Twisted Web with Python

Twisted is an event-driven engine, written in Python, ideal for network application development. It ensures high reliability and performance speed of the developed solutions.

web2py - Following Ease of Use Principle

web2py is a scalable open source Python-based web application framework launched in 2007 as a teaching tool which then expanded into the full-fledged database-driven framework. Quintagroup provides its clients with the most highly effective solutions based on this framework

Python IDE

There is no single best Python IDE. In this article, we examine eight Python integrated development environments, many open source, but some commercial. They are Eric, Komodo, Pydev, PyScripter, SPE, Spyder, Wing IDE and PyCharm.

Simple Python Programs

This article proposes a list of simple programs, written in Python. You can use them as samples, while learning to program with Python.

Mezzanine, Python-based CMS

Mezzanine is an open source content management system built on top of Django, a high-level Python Web framework for rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Now it is available under the BSD license.

Python at Google

Python as an official language at Google. Python usage on Google various applications.

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