PyMaemo/Accessing APIs without Python bindings
Introduction
Sometimes you don't need a complete binding for some library, perhaps all you require is a couple functions that will solve your problem or make your program faster. For these cases, you can use ctypes to cherry-pick the needed functions and use them right away.
Usage
Let's say you want to use libc's printf, for some reason. All you need in python is:
import ctypes
libc = ctypes.CDLL('libc.so.6')
libc.printf('Hello world!')
In a few words, you create an object correspondent to the library you need and use it to call the function directly. Things can get complicated if the parameters or the return type are complex structures, though.