Object Oriented Python - My Initial Opinion and Thoughts

The last couple of weeks, I have not been involved so much in virtualized networking as I have been writing a REST API Client in Python.

I have a pretty hardcore development background, ranging from various assembler languages to C and C++, and later on, Java (including Swing GUI, EJBs, and Application Servers like BEA WebLogic and IBM Websphere).

Then - just like that - I stopped developing. For a number of reasons.

Actually,  in getting out of the game, I found myself getting into Systems Integration, scope work (writing contracts and proposals), and so forth. Things that never really took me all that far from the original programming.

In getting back into research, the ability to use a vi editor, type 100wpm, and code quickly lends itself very well to doing research prototypes and stuff.

So with Orchestration and NFV, it became apparent I needed to write a REST client so that I could "do things" (i.e. provision, deprovision, MACD - an ops term for Move Add Change Delete).

I wound up choosing Python. And, thanks to quick fingers and google, I was able to crank some code very quickly.

Some things I did on this project include:

Object-Oriented classes with TRUE practical inheritance and encapsulation. Practical in the sense that it makes sense and is not done simply for the sake of exercising the language feature. For example, I created a class called Service, and extended that to L2 and L3 services, and the from there, I extended it further into use cases for an SDWAN (virtual elements that are L2 or L3 devices like bridges, gateways and switches).

I also exercised the JSON capabilities. Python seems to be built ground-up for REST APIs in the sense that it is extremely easy to render objects into dictionaries that in turn become JSON that can be sent up to a REST server.

The last feature I used was something called ArgParser. Initially, I was calling Main with a bunch of arguments. That was not feasible, so I then implemented the optarg functionality (people in Unix/Linux/POSIX are familiar with this). I then learned about ArgParser and refactored the code to use this rather cool way of passing arguments into a main function of a Python class to invoke it as a standalone from a command line.

There are some things to get used to in Python. For sure. It is very very loose. No terminators. No types. Yet, it is picky about how you indent your code (because you don't have the braces and parenthesis). I think it's okay for what it is designed for. For me the struggle was getting used to the lack of precision in it. Also, the fact that it barks at runtime rather than compile time for a lot of things is, in my opinion, quite bad for something you may shove out onto some kind of production server. I'll probably always lean on C / C++ but I do think Python has a place in this world.