What is the "state of the art" with respect to Python on Windows?

April 2, 2008 7:18 AM

What is the "state of the art" with respect to Python on Windows for Active Directory administration and interfacing with MS-SQL 2000/2005/2008?

I have a copy of Python: Programming on Win32, which is nice, but is also eight years old. I've seen a lot of modules and scripts out there (fewer overlapping choices than Perl, which is one of the reasons I'm moving away from Perl). However, I don't have a good sense of what Python professionals are actually using to accomplish these tasks: modules? some kind of COM voodoo? giving up and using VBScript?

On the Active Directory side, I'm looking to do the sorts of tasks one finds in the Active Directory Cookbook, often in a larger structured program rather than a handful of messy little scripts without much error checking. On the SQL side, I'm pretty comfortable using ODBC, up to about the point where I can actually flail about and use cursors in a reasonable manner. Python seems to have a lot of ODBC wrapper scripts, some pages say that the ODBC module itself is "old."

I'd rather just learn something current that might have some ongoing development (or at least a community of support), instead of finding something ancient that works but will never grow. Where can I find the invariable Windows gotchyas?

Windows-haters and related flames to /dev/nu— (wait, does Windows have a bitbucket? If it did, would it even be documented?) err, circular file. In the words of Hedwidg, "it's what I have to work with."

posted by adipocere to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Drat, Hedwig.
posted by adipocere at 7:22 AM on April 2

Umm - what about using IronPython and then getting access to the built-in libraries. Or potentially try Mono (I would think they have good LDAP support, and AD is sort of LDAP-compliant). Is it that you are trying to manage the Windows AD/SQL from a non-Windows environment? Because on Windows the .NET Framework SDK & IronPython are completely free... There are tons of sample code for how to use the .NET AD/data API's...

Worst-case scenario hook into the Win32 API's yourself and simply update the wrappers. Or find some other open-source project which has kept their wrappers up-to-date (Delphi/Pascal - Project JEDI, etc.).

(I would think the Windows bit-bucket would be the system paging file... ;-)
posted by jkaczor at 9:55 AM on April 2

Oops - I see you mentioned Python on Windows. Then I think your most supportable route would be IronPython via the .NET runtime and then accessing the .NET framework libraries.
posted by jkaczor at 10:02 AM on April 2

You can try this module.
posted by swapspace at 7:59 AM on April 3

IronPython + PowerShell = What you're looking for.
posted by togdon at 9:30 AM on April 7