Difference between libraries and frameworks

Wednesday, 22 March 2006

Guido,

This is my empirical test for what is a library and what is a framework:

If I can use it from the Read-Eval-Print-Loop, it’s a library. Otherwise, it’s a framework.

There are quite a few libraries that are actually frameworks hiding in the Standard Python Library. xml.sax requires subclassing. Can anyone tell me how I’m supposed to experiment with this from the interpreter? Other frameworks are: HTMLParser, sgmllib, htmllib. Experimenting with screen-scraping using these libraries has never been so un-fun. In contrast, libraries such as urllib are pure pleasure to use.

How do you do your python development? Do you use the interpreter to test out code or do you prefer to run test-driven scripts?

The entry 'Difference between libraries and frameworks' was posted on March 22nd, 2006 at 1:15 pm and last modified on March 22nd, 2006 at 9:35 pm, and is filed under Python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Difference between libraries and frameworks”

  1. Paddy McCarthy writes:
    No. 1 — March 24th, 2006 at 5:27 pm

    > How do you do your python development? Do you use the interpreter to
    > test out code or do you prefer to run test-driven scripts?

    I use the shell, then doctest.

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