import os.path as p
I'm also surprised that simplejson is used, instead of the built-in json in Python 2.6 and up. A good solution is:
try: import json
except ImportError: import simplejson as json2.6's json lacks simplejson's C accelerators [0] which makes it roughly 20 times slower than simplejson (2.7's simplejson is also ~50% slower than simplejson, as new performance optimizations were added in 2.1.0, as well as memoizations). Simplejson is also updated more often, which lead to it having less bugs, and interesting new features (the ability to natively serialize decimals was added in 2.1 for instance)
simplejson should be the preferred import, with json as a fallback if available.
[0] 2.6's json is simplejson 1.9; 2.7's is 2.0.9; the latest release of simplejson is 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 is in preparation
Is pip install that hard? Surely any deployed project is already managing a requirements.txt/buildout/setup.py/etc.
> means you'll eventually get those improvements
The C speedup extension for simplejson existed well before it was merged into Python stdlib as "json". Are you so sure you'll eventually get said improvement?
Not in 2.x, you won't.