Python for Data Science vs Python for Web Development

Python programming has contained various frameworks and features to expand in web application development, graphical user interfaces, data analysis, data visualization, etc. so, python programming language might not be an ideal choice for web application development, but is extensively used by many organizations for evaluating large datasets, for data visualization, for running data analysis or prototyping. Python programming language is gaining traction amongst users for data science whilst being outmoded as a web programming language. The idea of this article post is to provide a comparison on the two completely different purposes of using Python language and help understand that it is not necessary to know Python web programming language for doing data science in Python.

Python for Data Science

Organizations of all sizes and industries – from the top financial institutions to the smallest big data start-ups are using Python programming language to run their business.

Python language mainly comes in the former category and is finding increased adoption in numerical computations, machine learning and several data science applications. Python language can always do anything, excluding performance dependent and low level stuff. So, the best bet to use Python programming language is for data analysis and statistical computations. Learning Python programming for web development mainly requires programmers to master various web frameworks like Django that can help the build websites whereas learning Python for data science always requires data scientists to learn the usage of regular expressions, get working with the scientific libraries and master the data visualization concepts.

Python web programming mainly requires programmers to learn about the various python web development frameworks, which can be intimidating because the documentation available for the python web development frameworks might be somewhat difficult to understand.

Python Web Development Frameworks

There are always several Python web application frameworks available for free like-

Django

Django is mainly the python web development framework for perfectionists with deadlines. Python web development with django is basically the best suited for developing database driven web applications with attractive features like automatic admin interface and a templating system. For web development projects that don’t require extensive features, Django may be overkill because of its confusing file system and strict directory structure.

Flask

It is mainly a simple and lightweight solution for beginners who want to get started with developing single-page web applications. This framework does not support for validation, data abstraction layer and many other components that various other frameworks include.

CherryPy

It mainly emphasizes on Pythonic conventions so that programmers can build web applications just the way they would do it using object oriented Python programming.

There are always so many other web frameworks like Pyramid, Bottle, and Pylons etc. but regardless of the fact, whichever web framework a python programmer mainly uses, the challenge is that he/she needs to pay close attention to detailing on the tutorials and documentation.