Which of the 500 plus currently used programming languages should you invest your learning time in? While many programming languages are used only in the lab and theoretical settings, others like Python find use in day-to-day coding and businesses.
Python, a useful language to pick up and apply, requires only a little ingenuity to create amazing results. It ‘s being put to use by top-tier companies and conforms to real-world applications and businesses easily.
Here, we will help you take a closer look at the top 10 real-world applications of Python that are whipping up opportunities for developers and users who learn python the hard way.
1) Development of web-based applications
Python, along with its robust libraries related to internet protocols such as HTML and XML, allows for easy web development. Its libraries support e-mail processing, JSON, FTP, and IMAP along with a plethora of other processes.
Python has a user-friendly socket interface and packages index with several libraries to support development processes.
Some useful Python libraries for Internet and web development are:
- BeautifulSoup – An HTML parser
- Paramiko –For SSH2 protocol implementation
- Twisted Python – Provides support for asynchronous network programming
- Feedparser – Useful for parsing Atom and RSS feeds
- Requests –HTTP client library
Django and Pyramid are other helpful Python-based frameworks. The real-world applications of Python programming also rely on frameworks like flask and bottle.
CGI scripts set the platform for advanced CMS applications such as Plone and Django CMS.
2) Corel: PaintShop Pro
PaintShop Pro is a popular Corel photo editor that grabs screenshots, modifies pictures, performs a graphics-oriented task to perfection, and helps digital artists draw new images. Paintshop Pro by Coral is dependent on Python scripting.
It is important that you have a grasp on the basics of Python in order to automate and edit tasks with PaintShop Pro.
3) Science/ Numeric Applications
Python finds several applications in the world of science with the following:
- SciPy: Suite of Python codes for mathematics, engineering, and science-based applications
- IPython: Used for editing and recording work sessions. IPython codes support parallel computing and visualizations
- Pandas: A useful data-modelling and data-analysis library
- Software Carpentry Course: This package imparts knowledge about running bootcamps and scientific computing through open-access teaching material
- NumPy: Supports complex numerical calculations
Optimum speeds, high productivity, and comprehensive sets of useful tools like Numeric Python and Scientific Python have led to Python becoming an important component of applications related to computation and scientific data processing. FreeCAD, a 3D modeling software, and Abaqus, a finite element type software, are also coded in Python.
4) Different Programming Paradigms
Python provides wide-scale real-world support to different programming paradigms. Along with supporting structured programming, it provides a reliable platform for object-oriented program codes.
The features of Python are designed to aid the functions and tools of functional programming languages as well. The libraries of Python come in handy for enabling the processes related to automatic memory management and dynamic type systems.
Python programming paradigms and features allow for the development of several small and large applications as well as complex software programs for use in the real world.
5) Facebook
The product department of Facebook relies on several Python applications, thus making it the third most-used language for the social media giant after C++ and the PHP dialect, Hack. Python libraries allow production engineers to manage several utilities and services related to Facebook.
From managing the infrastructure to hardware imaging, binary distribution, and operational automation -Python can do it all. The primary utility of Python lies in its libraries wherein engineers need not maintain or write big codes. They can use Python based applications to get their improvements live.
Python also provides scalable infrastructural capabilities to Facebook to make it work with more efficiency. TORconfig handles network switch setups and imagery processes for Facebook. FBOSS is used for handling whitebox switch CLIs, while Dapper comes in use for scheduling and executing maintenance work.
Many open-source Python projects have been written by Facebook for Py3; these include the Python Async IRC bot framework and Facebook Ads API, among many others.
6) Honeywell
The documentation of large systems serves to be error-prone and expensive. Honeywell utilizes the capabilities of Python to conduct automated testing of such applications. Python also helps in maintaining and controlling a cooperative environment to serve the documentation of different Honeywell applications.
Python also aids report generation to provide robust backup to the documentation for its different setups.
7) 3D Graphics and Games
The real-world application of Python that’s most exciting of learners and developers pertains to the world of gaming. PyGame and PyKyra are two significant Python frameworks that are useful for the development of games.
There are 3D-rendering libraries in Python that are packaged with the right tools and functions for enabling 3D graphics and games. In case you are in the business of game development, you may want to check out the features of PyWeek, which is a popular game programming contest that has taken the real world by storm.
Python is largely instrumental in facilitating the development of 2D imaging software of the kinds of Inkscape, GIMP, and Scribus. Blender, Houdini, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Maya, and other 3D animation packages, have also used Python codes in variable proportions. Civilization-IV, Vega Strike, and Disney’s Toontown Online are among the most popular games scripted with Python
8) Spotify
Spotify- the music streaming giant – ranks high on the list of Python supporter. The engineers at Spotify primarily use Python for enabling their back-end services and data analysis processes.
In the back end, Spotify comprises of several services communicating over ZeroMQ (ZeroMQ is a open source network library is scripted in C++ and Python along with other languages). The development team at Spotify considers Python a valuable language as it supports fast development pipelines while writing codes.
The recent additions to Spotify’s architecture use Gevent that offers a fast event loop comprising of high-level synchronous API. Spotify has introduced several Python analytics in order to provide recommendations and suggestions for its users.
Luigi, a Python module, which immaculately syncs with Hadoop, is used for the purpose of interpreting analytical results. Luigi handles the working of libraries and collates error logs to allow for fast troubleshooting and redeployment.
In totality, Spotify applies more than 6000 Python processes that operate together at the nodes of a Hadoop cluster.
9) Test Driven Development
Python adopts user-friendly and convenient test-driven development modules that makes the entire process of coding easier for developers. Testing also becomes a breeze with the adoption of Python’s test-driven development concepts.
Python paves the way for the writing of test cases, even before any code development takes place. As and when the coding is done, the test cases written beforehand come into action and start testing the codes simultaneously. The results are provided in real time to developers and this helps in more accurate and quick development of codes.
The test-driven approach of Python is very useful in the real-world scenario as it enables accurate checking or testing of necessary pre-requirements on the basis of source codes.
10) Netflix
Netflix uses Python comprehensively, and in a manner similar to that of Spotify. It relies on Python codes to power the data analysis codes present on the server side.
Over the years, software engineers at Netflix have introduced a number of Python tools and applications. They cite Python’s active development community and comprehensive suite of third-party libraries (along with its standard library) as important resources for solving various problems.
As Python is an easy language to learn and use for developing codes, it has made solid inroads into many other services provided by Netflix. Python is primarily used by Netflix in powering their Central Alert Gateway. This web application allows for the processing of alerts from just about anywhere.
Thereafter, the alerts are routed to groups or people that are required to view them for the sake of taking further actions. This Python-backed app is designed to curb duplicate alerts that have already been handled before. In addition, it performs automated solutions of the likes of rebooting or terminating processes.
A huge plus for Netflix, the Python app handles a huge volume of alerts intelligently, thereby relieving developers and engineers from getting flooded with redundant calls.
Conclusion
Robotics, web scraping, data analysis, scripting, artificial intelligence, machine learning, face detection, console-based applications, color detection, 3D CAD applications, and audio-based applications are some other prominent areas where Python is used on a daily basis.
The same rings true for Python-based enterprise applications, applications for images, and video-based applications. They are all real-world examples of how Python is making deep inroads into the domains of web and desktop applications.
Easy to use and simple to learn, Python may sometimes be marked as being slower than Java and some other programming languages. Fortunately, it is possible to speed up Python applications through proper code maintenance and utilization of custom runtime.
This makes Python a much-loved and widely used programming language with numerous real-world applications to its name.
