14.4 Wrapping and combining CLI applications
One common kind of automation involves running several programs, some of which are not Python applications. This commonly arises when integrating multiple tools, which are often applications used to build applications or documents. Since the programs aren’t written in Python, it’s impossible to refactor each program to create a composite Python application. When using a non-Python application, we can’t follow the Combining two applications into one recipe shown earlier in this chapter.
Instead of aggregating the Python components, an alternative is to wrap the other programs in Python, creating a composite application. The use case is very similar to the use case for writing a shell script. The difference is that Python is used instead of a shell language. Using Python has some advantages:
Python has a rich collection of data structures. Most shell languages are limited to strings and...
