David Abrahams wrote: > Is there somewhere a summary of criteria by which I'd choose win32com or > comtypes?
Not that I know of. I offer a so-obvious-as-to-be-almost-unneeded list here. It's entirely likely that I've misrepresented things somewhat so I'd be very grateful for additions & editions. ================== pywin32 (win32com) ================== PRO: Been around for years so more mature, more stable and more (knowledgeable) users. PRO: For those interfaces which it *does* wrap, does most or all of the dirty work for you. PRO: Actively maintained CON / PRO: Makes things so easy for the novice programmer that they forgo any attempt to learn how COM really works... which means that when it gets messy they don't really know what's going on. CON: Has dark and little known/tried corners; I think I discover one new win32com feature every month either through this list or from reading the source to find something else out. CON: Occasionally shows its age, esp. wrt Unicode, datetime and other types whiseh postdate its original conception. CON: Only wraps those interfaces (including, critically, IDispatch) for which its maintainers have time / inclination. ======== comtypes ======== PRO: Effectively native Python -- relies on ctypes which is a C extension but now part of stdlib. PRO: Actively maintained PRO: Can, in principle, wrap any interface. PRO: Newer / smaller so fewer dark corners and refactor-candidates. PRO/CON: You have to understand more about the way the COM works -- as above this has positive and negative points. CON: Newer, so less tried-and-tested: fewer (experienced) users. CON: You have to do the dirty work yourself; as with ctypes, more scope for crashing Python nastily. TJG _______________________________________________ python-win32 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-win32
