Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

By : Brian Allbee, Nimesh Verma
Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

By: Brian Allbee, Nimesh Verma

Overview of this book

Software Engineering is about more than just writing code—it includes a host of soft skills that apply to almost any development effort, no matter what the language, development methodology, or scope of the project. Being a senior developer all but requires awareness of how those skills, along with their expected technical counterparts, mesh together through a project's life cycle. This book walks you through that discovery by going over the entire life cycle of a multi-tier system and its related software projects. You'll see what happens before any development takes place, and what impact the decisions and designs made at each step have on the development process. The development of the entire project, over the course of several iterations based on real-world Agile iterations, will be executed, sometimes starting from nothing, in one of the fastest growing languages in the world—Python. Application of practices in Python will be laid out, along with a number of Python-specific capabilities that are often overlooked. Finally, the book will implement a high-performance computing solution, from first principles through complete foundation.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Programming versus Software Engineering

Persisting Object Data to Files

At first glance, the process of reading and writing data to and from a file system-resident data store probably looks much simpler than the equivalent processes for many database-backed storage mechanisms. Reading and writing files, after all, is a very basic process. In reality, it's a slightly more complex process, though. There are precautions that need to be taken to deal with things such as file system permissions, hard shutdowns of the application using data access, and even system crashes, to some degree. While these complicate development somewhat, they are perhaps more challenging to identify as possibilities than they are to implement safeguards around.

This chapter will cover the following:

  • The basic component project setup for hms_artisan
  • A further abstraction layer to encapsulate the file system-based data storage...