software recommendations - Seeking alternatives to pgRouting for open source routing / network analysis?

I was wondering if there are any alternatives to pgRouting tools.

Thinking about it for a bit, I think the only alternative is to use R or RPY to do the analysis.

Basically I'm trying to solve routing problems based on nonPostGIS databases. As most of my data is actually stored in a different format; however, it's not to hard to convert. I'm finding that pgRouting to my dumb silly brain is difficult to implement. So perhaps a non-database solution that I can easily tweak would be ideal for me

Answer

[Edit: this has been superseded by nx_spatial which is available from pypi (easy_install nx_spatial). Importing shapefiles is now standard in networkx 1.4]

I've been kind of disappointed by the lack of geometric network tools in ESRI's Python GP API, so I wrote up something that loads Shapefiles and Feature Classes into networkx directional graphs (DiGraphs).

It is still a work in progress, but it might be an okay starting off point for something that can help with your problem.

http://bitbucket.org/gallipoli/utilitynetwork/

Samples:

from utilitynetwork import Network

net = Network()

#load single file, method reqs OGR
net.loadshp("/shapefiles/test.shp")


#load directory full of shapefiles
net.loadshp("/shapefiles")

#load a feature class, req ESRI gp object, should work with shps as well
import arcgisscripting
gp = arcgisscripting.create(9.3)
net.loadfc("C:\somedb.gdb\featureclass", gp)

#Accessing node/edge data is done by the key value (the geometry as a tuple).

#access node data at x=4, y=2
nodekey = (4, 2)
net.node[nodekey]

Network is inherits from networkx.DiGraph, so all of that functionality is available.