Can python programming be used effectively for real-time robotic process automation in 2024?

All answers to this question.

Moving from UIPath to is a great way to save costs, but it requires a higher skill ceiling for your team. For legacy apps, PyAutoGUI is decent, but it lacks "element-level" awareness since it mostly relies on image recognition or coordinates. I would recommend looking into the RPA Framework (Robocorp), which is built on top of Python and provides much better logging and error handling for enterprise environments. It makes the maintenance of scripts much easier because it uses keyword-driven automation which is more readable than raw scripts.

   Answered 2024-01-17 by Rebecca Hall

Does your legacy application support any command-line arguments or backend database access, or is the GUI truly the only way to interact with it via <python programming>?

   Answered 2024-01-19 by Steven King

• Steven, unfortunately, it's a 15-year-old VB6 app with no API or CLI. It’s strictly GUI interactions. That's why I'm worried about script stability if a window shifts by even a few pixels. Do you think specialized libraries for Windows UI Automation are better than standard coordinate-based clicking for this specific type of old software?

     Commented 2024-01-20 by Andrew Young

I have successfully used the pywinauto library for this. It interacts with the actual control elements of Windows apps, making RPA much more stable.

   Answered 2024-01-22 by Laura Scott

• I've used pywinauto too, and Laura is right—it's far superior to coordinate-based tools. It actually "sees" the buttons and text fields in the code.

     Commented 2024-01-23 by Kevin Moore