Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

Persisting Object Data to Files

At first glance, the process of reading and writing data to and from a file system-resident data store probably looks much simpler than the equivalent processes for many database-backed storage mechanisms. Reading and writing files, after all, is a very basic process. In reality, it's a slightly more complex process, though. There are precautions that need to be taken to deal with things such as file system permissions, hard shutdowns of the application using data access, and even system crashes, to some degree. While these complicate development somewhat, they are perhaps more challenging to identify as possibilities than they are to implement safeguards around.

This chapter will cover the following:

• The ...