The intent of this page is to list the most commonly used Python modules, in hopes that it will provide useful for other programmers (especially beginners).
Please avoid listing modules that either:
- You have made
- Don't have community aproval (ie: are not widely used, are regarded as "unpythonic")
Do list modules that:
- Get recommended often in the Tutor or comp.lang.python lists
Be warned that this list is subjective by its very nature. It's only intended as a helpful guide. It is not definitive in any way, nor should it discourage developers into developing their own modules.
Please provide a short description for each module. Try to put each module in the category that matchs it's "main" audience, since a module might fall into a couple of categories.
Game development
[http://www.pygame.org/ PyGame] - Wrapper to the SDL library.
General category
[http://www.jorendorff.com/articles/python/path/ Python Path] - Wraps the functionality in the os.path module.
GUI
[http://www.wxpython.org/ wxPython] - wxWidgets bindings to Python.
[http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/ PythonCard] - Framework built on top of wxPython
HTML Forms
[http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/ClientForm/ ClientForm] - "ClientForm is a Python module for handling HTML forms on the client side, useful for parsing HTML forms, filling them in and returning the completed forms to the server. It developed from a port of Gisle Aas' Perl module HTML::Form, from the libwww-perl library, but the interface is not the same." - from the website.
HTML Parser
[http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/ Beautiful Soup] - HTML/XML parser designed for quick turnaround projects like screen-scraping, will accept bad markup.
Scientific
[http://vpython.org/ Visual Python] - Offers real-time 3D output, is easily usable by novice programmers, excellent for physics.
[http://www.scipy.org/ SciPy] - Includes modules for graphics and plotting, optimization, integration, special functions, signal and image processing, genetic algorithms, ODE solvers, and others.
Threading
[http://chrisarndt.de/en/software/python/threadpool.html ThreadPool] - Intuitive approach to threads, well-explained.
Web development
[http://www.turbogears.org TurboGears] - Rapid web development megaframework.
Platform specific
[http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ Psyco] - Psyco can speed up the execution of any Python code (x86 only).
[http://pyinstaller.hpcf.upr.edu/cgi-bin/trac.cgi PyInstaller] - Packages Python programs into stand-alone executables, under Windows, Linux and Irix.
Linux
Mac
[http://pythonmac.org/wiki/py2app py2app] - Creates stand-alone apps (like py2exe for Mac)
Windows
[https://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/ PyWin32] - Python extensions for Windows.
[http://www.py2exe.org/ Py2exe] - Converts python scripts into executable windows programs, able to run without requiring a python installation.
XML Processing
[http://effbot.org/zone/element-index.htm ElementTree] - The Element type is a simple but flexible container object, designed to store hierarchical data structures, such as simplified XML infosets, in memory.