At the company where I am currently employed, we are facing challenges just like everyone else in relation to a drastically shrinking revenue stream with no encouraging sign of a reversing trend anytime soon.

Given all that, it boggles me why some money is spent on software where there's a free/cheaper alternative.

I have seen plenty of recipes for this on the net, but nothing that would suit my needs so I made a few functions which may prove useful to others.....

But first, here's what I ideally needed. Basically I'm working on an application that stores a package qualified class name for a data handler type object in the database.

For example...

package.subpackage.module.TheClass

And at runtime, I want my data object to just return an initialized one ready to use.

[f.get_handler() for f in fields]

Several times over the past year I have needed to get a team member up to speed on python development, and I've found myself sending out the same email over and over, so I thought I would take a bit of time to formalize what's been useful for me so that it may benefit someone else.