Python Magazine

by Zachary Voase

Bioinformatics is on the rise in the world of science. More and more computer scientists have begun to gravitate towards this exciting field, and as tools and libraries such as BioPython evolve, this number will only increase. In this article, Zachary introduces developers and dabblers who are familiar with Python to the biology powering this exciting subject, and the utilities available for Pythonistas to work with biological data.

by Jeff Scudder

It seems more and more data is moving into the Cloud. The Internet, that is. The benefits are manifold: less disk usage on your machine along with the added benefit that your data is accessible anywhere you can get on the Net. The next time you are writing an application, think about how happy your users would be if they could use it on any machine and still have the same configuration and data. There are, of course, a few drawbacks to storing everything in the Cloud: there is the problem posed by offline access, the problem of finding affordable online storage, and finally, the performance cost of fetching data from the web. While these limitations can present significant challenges, none of them is insurmountable. This article shows you how to create a remote storage solution using Python and Google Spreadsheets.

by Eugen Wintersberger

Saving data to disk is a common job for every program. PyTables offers a simple interface to the great HDF5 library, saving your data in a portable way. This article shows a real life example of how to convert an ASCII format to HDF5 using PyTables.

by JC Cruz

This article will teach you how to write an Xcode menu script in Python. You will learn how to provide data to the script and how to handle its output. Next, you will learn to use an Xcode script macro or utility scripts. And you will get four script examples, written in Python, which you can change for your own use.

by Brian Jones

The world of technology looks, from the outside, like a massive sea of wires and code—with so many directions to sail in that one could easily get lost and drown.

by Mark Mruss

GUI programming, like many other types of programming, can sometimes prove exhausting because you must repeat yourself over and over again. AVC is one tool available to Python GUI programmers that attempts to simplify things by synchronizing application data and GUI widgets.

by Doug Hellmann

PyCon 2008 was held March 12-20 in Chicago. The explosive growth in attendance of the conference translated to an increase in energy and enthusiasm, from both attendees and organizers.

by Steve Holden

This month Steve speculates about the PyCon that will already be past by the time you read this column, discusses Python 3.0 progress, eclectically surveys the news from the Python world and discusses Python's two best-known web frameworks.