Writing a basic asset management system in Python

Ponge

I'm trying to teach myself some Python for work and find that I learn a lot more when I give myself a simple (?) task to complete and then enhance/modify. So I'm looking to begin writing an asset management system, that would access and write to a database, just some basic information to begin with. It will be tracking information on 3d models so maybe something like Asset ID, asset name, asset location etc.

So what I'm looking for in some advice on where to start, or maybe similar systems that I could use as reference. I've used a similar system at work that wrote to an XML file, is it just a case of writing/reading to this file or do I need some sort f more complicated database software?

Am I on the wrong foot here writing this in Python? I'm using it because it has good integration with the software I use at work (Maya and Houdini) and I have a basic knowledge of it, but no idea where to begin when it comes to GUI. Does anyone have any advice when it comes to that?

Overall I'm a little bit clueless, so any help is appreciated!

Cheers.

Jimmy King

Python would be fine for that. For a GUI python has Tkinter built in. There are also a couple of Qt bindings for it and wxWidgets which are all much nicer than Tkinter from what I gather (I haven't done much with any of them). I have played with wxWidgets the most and would recommend going fro Qt instead. People generally like Qt and I found wxWidgets to not be very Pythonic (probably not your main concern right now) and most of the tutorials and examples I found weren't very good.

There's also always the web front end route which gives you plain old html/css/javascript for your UI. There are tons of good frameworks and separate tools for that in Python from little micro frameworks like Flask and Bottle to bigger, more full featured frameworks like Django and Pyramid. For what you're doing if you want to go the web app route, I'd go with Flask or Bottle, probably. Django and Pyramid, particularly Django, are a bit large and complex if your goal is not to learn and build up skills in a large web framework or to build a large site intended to be used by more than just you. Flask and Bottle can also have all of the same functionality added to them if it does turn out you need or want the extras later.