Usage

Pysmo is just as much an opinionated way of writing code as it is a library. This section of the documentation focuses on the philosophy and inner workings of pysmo. This will help you write pysmo-like code using pysmo. If you are looking for specifics on a particular component of pysmo, please refer to the relevant section in the API reference.

Library vs. framework

Before using a third-party package for your project, it is important to consider if what you are using is a library or a framework. One might define them as follows:

• Libraries serve as building blocks to solve more complex problems or for building applications.
• Frameworks provide ready-made solutions to solve complex problems. A framework may easily also be considered an application itself.

Distinguishing between the two can be a bit tricky when it comes to using tools like pysmo. Often it is not only a question of what the respective authors intend their software to be, but also how you use it for your purposes. A helpful way of looking at this (and an important consideration for future-proofing your code), is to ask yourself in which ways your code depends on the third-party package you are using. By this we mean factors such as:

• How susceptible is your project to potential future changes in the package you are using? If you are only using built-in features you are probably safe, but if you are writing new features (e.g. new functions for data processing) they might suddenly stop working.
• Do you understand what a particular package does, or does it feel more like a black box when you e.g. use a particular class or call a function from that package? This is often influenced by how integrated or dependent individual components of that package are.
• Does the third-party package play nicely with other packages or data formats?
• Can it easily be replaced by a similar package (or your own implementation)?
• Does using a particular package make it impossible to e.g. rewrite your code in a different programming language?

Often it boils down to a trade-off between convenience and transparency, and which side of it you find yourself on more. With that said, the core of pysmo is considered to be very much a library. Outside the core part, there are some extra bits that fall more on the framework side of things. To accommodate for that, pysmo organises things into different namespaces. More application-like modules are found in pysmo.tools, while everything else is library-like.