Hi there, Ruby transfuge too. > Although I'm not 100% new to Python, most of my experience using high- > level languages is with Ruby. I had a job doing Rails web development > a little ways back and I really enjoyed it. At my current workplace > though, we're looking at using Python and I'm trying to get back into > the Python "groove" as it were. > > I've got plenty of materials to get me up to speed on the mechanics of > the language, but I was wondering about the equivalent of some tools I > was used to using in Ruby. If there's not anything that's a one-to-one > equivalent I totally understand, I'm just looking for some pointers > here to get me started. :) > > 1) Rake - is there an equivalent of Rake? I've seen a bit about SCons, > and it looks really nice, but it seems geared towards being a Make > replacement for C/C++ rather than something that's used to work with > Python itself. Is there anything like a Python build tool? (Or do I > even need something like that? I haven't worked with any large Python > systems, just little things here and there.)
Zed Shaw (of Mongrel fame) apparently created a pythonic rake called Vellum. However, the website returns a 404, and the egg doesn't seem to work. Shame. > 2) Gems - I've seen a bit about Eggs, but they don't seem to have > anywhere near the official status gems do for Ruby. Are there any > "package management" things like this for Python, or do you usually > just grab the code you need as-is? Eggs looks like gems. Except that some of them have actual documentation. The Egg index is here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi. But I'll grant you that easy_install doesn't have quite the list of options gem has. > 3) Web frameworks - yeah, I realize there are tons of these, but are > TurboGears, Django, and Zope still the big ones? I've seen a lot about > Pylons, is that a separate framework or is it a ... well, frame that > other things are built on? (TG seems to be related to Pylons at a > glance?) Django is kind of like the Rails of Python, while Pylons is kind of like Merb (it integrates different frameworks to get the job done). > 4) Unit Test frameworks - If there's a behavioral test suite like > RSpec that's be awesome, but I'd be happy to settle for a good, solid > unit testing system. BDD doesn't seem to be a big focus of the Python community. No Cucumber either :(. Have a look at Nose, it looks decent. Cheers, Emm -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
