Python scripting in ArcGIS

Helllo Everybody

Today I’m gonna share with you one of my most exciting experiences so far……. ArcPy.

It was honestly for a long time that I was somehow obsessed with programming in ArcGIS framework. That was the reason I started to learn ArcObject, like 2 years ago. Basically, ArcObject was “a development environment of the ArcGIS family of applications. Using Visual Basic for Applications, C Sharp (programming language) or Java (programming language) SDK for ArcGIS it allows developers to extend these applications” (Wikipedia).

Recently, I became familiar with such an amazing new tool called ArcPy. The ArcPy package allows for a close integration of ArcGIS and Python. In other words, ArcPy package (I mean combination of all its modules, classes, tools and functions) gives access to the ALL geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS.

ArcPy was introduced in version 10 of ArcGIS, and prior to that all this functionalities used to be addressed by ArcGISscripting module. This amazing package takes advantage of OOP (object oriented programming) concept and it let you, to have control over almost everything in ArcMap, ArcCatalog and Arctoolbox.

I feel like that this would be enough as brief introduction for this tool. I would not probably start teaching it from scratch here, but actually I intend to write some more about the Python scripting in ArcGIS using ArcPy in my future posts.