Hi there! Founder here, slightly gobsmacked to see this top of HN. Do feel free to ask me any questions about the platform :) We also have a bunch of tutorial-cum-demo videos at: https://anvil.works/learn#tutorials
Oooh, cum-videos!
Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
21–30 of 207 posts
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#22I can see this as an amazing teaching aid too. You can take away all the learning about tech stacks and platforms and various languages and server config etc. for a while and concentrate on developing the idea and developing a process. Edit: My son is going to love this when he gets home! It seems good enough that you could push the prototype live as an MVP. I am interested if you grow to something to the stage where…
No kidding! We were at PyCon UK this weekend, and we had an 8-year-old girl building database-driven web apps in an afternoon:
https://twitter.com/anvil_works/status/924648315983155200
As to your second point - yes, that's a common pattern. We see people going "oh, let me just sketch out the UI...well, I'll add a bit of code...oh, look, it's in production and scaling!"
We do have a lot of support for integrating with external systems, so it's easy to gradually move off from (or on to) Anvil. External access to the database is just the start of it :)
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#23Looks very promising! - Does anybody know what technology stack is being used here? Django + some JS stack for the front end?
Glad to hear it! Some details about the tech stack: * Front-end code is compiled from Python to JS with Skulpt ( http://skulpt.org ) * The back-end code runs in a custom Python sandbox. Calls to server functions go over a secure web socket (this lets us do fun things like returning database rows directly from server functions, rather than faffing with REST APIs all day) * The built-in database (Data Tables) is based…
Interesting. I've been looking for alternatives to React or Angular for some time. I've enjoyed playing with Elm recently. My preferred back end is Python Tornado RethinkDB, so browser GUIs in Python is appealing. I looked at https://github.com/skulpt and it looks like the compile to JS step happens on the client side, unlike Elm. What's performance like?
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#24This looks really really cool.
In the 90s we had RAD tools like Delphi or Visual Basic which allow you to create simple apps very quickly. I feel that we are missing RAD on the web these days. There are so many different moving pieces. To do a full modern web app you need to learn different languages and frameworks plus other technologies for hosting such as containers or AWS, etc. That might work for complex apps, but sometimes you just want to do something simple that you can easily design visually, use one language and hit one button to publish. I have the feeling that Anvil is moving in this direction.
And extra love for using Python :D
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#25Saw it demo'd at PyConUK this weekend and it looked v impressive!
Thanks! We had a blast at PyCon. We built over 140 demo apps in four days, and now we're waiting for our voices to return :)
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#26This looks really really cool. In the 90s we had RAD tools like Delphi or Visual Basic which allow you to create simple apps very quickly. I feel that we are missing RAD on the web these days. There are so many different moving pieces. To do a full modern web app you need to learn different languages and frameworks plus other technologies for hosting such as containers or AWS, etc. That might work for complex apps, b…
SilverStream used to do something a bit similar, and compile everything into Servlets. This is pre-2000.
http://www2.sys-con.com/itsg/virtualcd/java/archives/0403/be...
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#27This looks really really cool. In the 90s we had RAD tools like Delphi or Visual Basic which allow you to create simple apps very quickly. I feel that we are missing RAD on the web these days. There are so many different moving pieces. To do a full modern web app you need to learn different languages and frameworks plus other technologies for hosting such as containers or AWS, etc. That might work for complex apps, b…
Were you at PyCon UK this weekend? Cause you just repeated our pitch, just about word for word :)
I started out on QBASIC and Visual Basic, back in the day, and as far as I'm concerned it's practically dereliction of duty that there wasn't something similar available for the web. Eventually, we got fed up enough to go and build it ourselves.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glad to hear it! Some details about the tech stack: * Front-end code is compiled from Python to JS with Skulpt ( http://skulpt.org ) * The back-end code runs in a custom Python sandbox. Calls to server functions go over a secure web socket (this lets us do fun things like returning database rows directly from server functions, rather than faffing with REST APIs all day) * The built-in database (Data Tables) is based…
Interesting. I've been looking for alternatives to React or Angular for some time. I've enjoyed playing with Elm recently. My preferred back end is Python Tornado RethinkDB, so browser GUIs in Python is appealing. I looked at https://github.com/skulpt and it looks like the compile to JS step happens on the client side, unlike Elm. What's performance like?
Strictly speaking, that compilation happens in JS, not necessarily client-side ;)
(Right now, it does run in the browser, but we'll be moving it to the back-end soon to improve performance. For now it's good enough.)
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pricing is per-developer-seat; we don't limit the number of apps you can build or publish. Usage limits are pretty soft right now (depends heavily on what you do in your code and how hard you're hammering our servers), but the general intention is to charge you more as you scale up your team, rather than because you got a few thousand users.
Does Anvil render server-side or is it client-side only? My issue is if being used for websites, on average our sites get ~50k visitors a month or even spikes with that amount. The same goes for complexity of the system, for simple html sites it will not matter much but for very dynamic apps this will require a lot of CPU time.
Reading the docs, it says the Forms run on the client, so most rendering should run too. Client-side rendering - while it has its disadvantages - shouldn't be worse for the CPU time than server-side, though. What's your concern?
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#30This looks really really cool. In the 90s we had RAD tools like Delphi or Visual Basic which allow you to create simple apps very quickly. I feel that we are missing RAD on the web these days. There are so many different moving pieces. To do a full modern web app you need to learn different languages and frameworks plus other technologies for hosting such as containers or AWS, etc. That might work for complex apps, b…
Were you at PyCon UK this weekend? Cause you just repeated our pitch, just about word for word :) I started out on QBASIC and Visual Basic, back in the day, and as far as I'm concerned it's practically dereliction of duty that there wasn't something similar available for the web. Eventually, we got fed up enough to go and build it ourselves.
I wasn't there :)
I learned to program with Turbo Pascal and then moved to Delphi. While watching your introduction demo my thoughts were "this is like Delphi for the web". I've also missed something like this for a long time.
I'm definitely going to try your product!