the editor is really nice, it's ability to sense what I am about to type is borderline magic. It'd be cool if that were open sourced, but I understand if few to none of this is going to be since they're trying to bootstrap a business.
Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
161–170 of 207 posts
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
As far as I can tell, the footprint is around 1MB for the combined skulpt-min.js and sculpt-stdlib.js (not sure why the latter apparently isn't minified). That's pretty huge and makes for a large barrier against using Anvil for a public-facing app. Moving the compilation to the back-end would eliminate the footprint problem -- or would you still have the stdlib running in the client? Any further comments on footprint issues? As it is, we're talking about about two orders of magnitude bigger footprint than some javascript options.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#163I love it. But seeing this now, in 2017, is a bit depressing to me. For the last 15 years Microsoft has been putting out the same RAD tools, but based on ASP.NET/C#/Visual Studio. Things like drop-in provider-based OAuth, editing versioned database projects, WYSIWYG UI, etc. Publishing to the web, even the flow of clicking on a button to edit its handler looks like it was based directly on Winforms which is a 12 year…
I am the developer of Solvent IDE, which attempts to tackle this problem in a comprehensive way, ie from the ground up as a platform: http://codesolvent.com/web-dev/
It is not as easy a problem as it seems...beyond the technical hurdle, a major obstacle is developers :)
While you like this paradigm, I am afraid a lot of developers generally scuff at these types of products.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
As far as I can tell, the footprint is around 1MB for the combined skulpt-min.js and sculpt-stdlib.js (not sure why the latter apparently isn't minified). That's pretty huge and makes for a large barrier against using Anvil for a public-facing app. Moving the compilation to the back-end would eliminate the footprint problem -- or would you still have the stdlib running in the client? Any further comments on footprint…
Also, can you give any estimate at al as to when you'll have client-side compilation working?
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#165Hey, so there is another solution that is pretty popular out there that I'm sure you already know of: https://bubble.is/, and it doesn't seem to require any coding.
Can you explain what are the differences between Anvil and Bubble? I am currently using Bubble right now to make web apps. What makes Anvil better?
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the largest, most complex application running on Anvil today?
That I can talk about publicly? Probably https://lightningai.com/ . Their control panel drives companies' entire online marketing operation - creative, targeting, performance, and more - across multiple advertising services. That's a whole lotta UI. Their back end drives the advertising platforms' APIs (eg Google and Facebook), and it all hooks into great big machine learning operations that run on big beefy servers…
So, the UI/front0end of their app was created with and runs on Anvil, but the backend is entirely under their control? That's interesting. Very interesting.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#167the editor is really nice, it's ability to sense what I am about to type is borderline magic. It'd be cool if that were open sourced, but I understand if few to none of this is going to be since they're trying to bootstrap a business.
Thank you! When the PyCon UK lightning talks go up on YouTube, you'll be able to see my talk from last night about how we built that autocompleter.
Bottom line: Traditional web dev has starved us of decent tool support. Give us even a really basic autocompleter (especially one that knows about what's happening in the server and database) and it feels like borderline magic :)
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#168I love it. But seeing this now, in 2017, is a bit depressing to me. For the last 15 years Microsoft has been putting out the same RAD tools, but based on ASP.NET/C#/Visual Studio. Things like drop-in provider-based OAuth, editing versioned database projects, WYSIWYG UI, etc. Publishing to the web, even the flow of clicking on a button to edit its handler looks like it was based directly on Winforms which is a 12 year…
> Why aren't there more of these things out there? There are a few - I did like the MS PowerApps recently. But these things work well in an enterprise environment where "works" is important, but "users don't want to kill themselves during interaction" is not. These tools are usually great at putting together a quick CRUD app that fits requirements. But they're typically not flexible enough to give you that finished a…
"users don't want to kill themselves during interaction" - touché :)
I agree with you, but taking the create-react-app example again - I can very quickly scaffold a react app with necessary toolsets, built on top of webpack. This gets me up and running without having to mess with webpack config.
At some point, I need to break out of these opinionated guardrails and do my own thing. At that point create react app has an 'Eject' feature which opens up the black box and dumps all webpack configuration and scripts for me to hack away on. The Anvil tool seems to have something similar where you can grab all the sources, download, run, and publish it yourself.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#169Anybody know of any self-hosted alternatives to something like this?
It's an "enterprise feature" https://anvil.works/features On-site installation For when you need to keep sensitive data or apps inside your firewall. Anvil on-site installations allow you to develop and deploy your apps entirely in-house.
I usually stop reading reading when I read "Contact Us For Pricing". I would much prefer to see a straight number.
Re: Anvil: full stack web apps built only with Python
#170Hi 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
Awesome stuff. Are there any debugging capabilities? Being able to inspect variables and step through code is massively valuable, particularly for education, but also for devs.