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Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

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Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#51
post #21

This tool fills a very narrow use case for demos of AI chat. If you know Python and can run inference models on a colab then you can quickly whip up a demo UI with builtin components like chat with text and images. Arguably everyone is testing these apps so making them easy is cool for demo and prototyping. For anything more than a demo you don't use this.

xoogler/ML researcher here. Everyone at Google used colab because the bazel build process is like 1-2 minutes and even just firing up a fully bazel-built script usually takes several seconds. Frontend is also near impossible to get started with if you aren't in a large established team. Colab is the best solution to a self-inflicted problem, and colab widgets are super popular internally for building hacky apps. This library makes perfect sense in this context...

Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#52

What's with the obsession of writing web apps in Python? > Build custom UIs without writing Javascript/CSS/HTML Why? These three were built for the web and work flawlessly. I doubt that an abstraction built on top of these will result in faster development times. The State Management guide[1] explains state and then explains the usage. If you know Python and want to build a UI with it you'll have to read the guides.…

It appeals to me. I don't write fronted code, but sometimes I want a frontend, even if it's really dinky. This seems way more approachable to me than learning JS/all the shit you have to deal with to write a non-toy ui

Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#55
post #44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US Python foundational team was less than 10 people. If you think any 10 person team in a 200,000 employee corporation is that critical well I’d have to disagree When their jobs were moved to Munich there was a lot of discussion about how important they were, but something else stood out to me. One of the things they accomplished was taking over a year to make sure the monorepo can be upgraded to the latest versi…

What? The monorepo is huge that sounds like a nightmare to coordinate across so many engineers and such a huge codebase

you are right. made worse because there's an internal rule that you can't ever have two versions of a library in the monorepo ant the same time. it has to be one giant CL for the entire migration company-wide.

Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#56

What's with the obsession of writing web apps in Python? > Build custom UIs without writing Javascript/CSS/HTML Why? These three were built for the web and work flawlessly. I doubt that an abstraction built on top of these will result in faster development times. The State Management guide[1] explains state and then explains the usage. If you know Python and want to build a UI with it you'll have to read the guides.…

It appeals to me. I don't write fronted code, but sometimes I want a frontend, even if it's really dinky. This seems way more approachable to me than learning JS/all the shit you have to deal with to write a non-toy ui

Let's say you want a frontend for your server and have never written HTML before.

Where so you start? If you have decided on using Python for the UI you have a handful of libraries each with their own documentation. To get started you need to choose one and then read the guides.

If you decide to use HTML you have a whole lot more resources. I'd argue you'll be able to make a frontend faster using this approach.

I understand the hesitation because of the complexity associated with JS. Maybe you're thinking about bundlers and minifiers when you think about writing a frontend with JS.

But you don't need that. You can create amazing user experiences with a plain HTML, CSS and a JS file.

Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#57
post #42

reminds me of GWT (google web toolkit)

And Wt and JWt, which also handle the server side in C++ and Java. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wt_(web_toolkit) :

> The only server-side framework implementing the strategy of progressive enhancement automatically

Is this still true?

Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#58
For some clarity on the support here: at Google it’s very easy to publish arbitrary code on the Google GitHub, and a bit of a pain to get permission to publish (new) projects on your personal GitHub. It’s also not too tricky to take a project with you (i.e. transfer ownership) if you leave. For these reasons, many googlers just publish their hobby projects on GitHub under the Google org. That’s most likely what this is, the support disclaimer is the big giveaway.

Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#59
post #51
post #21

This tool fills a very narrow use case for demos of AI chat. If you know Python and can run inference models on a colab then you can quickly whip up a demo UI with builtin components like chat with text and images. Arguably everyone is testing these apps so making them easy is cool for demo and prototyping. For anything more than a demo you don't use this.

xoogler/ML researcher here. Everyone at Google used colab because the bazel build process is like 1-2 minutes and even just firing up a fully bazel-built script usually takes several seconds. Frontend is also near impossible to get started with if you aren't in a large established team. Colab is the best solution to a self-inflicted problem, and colab widgets are super popular internally for building hacky apps. This…

How could their monorepo build system with distributed build component caching be improved? What is faster at that scale?

FWIU Blaze was rewritten as Bazel without the Omega scheduler integration?

gn wraps Ninja build to build Chromium and Fuschia: https://gn.googlesource.com/gn

Re: Google Mesop: Build web apps in Python

#60
post #21

This tool fills a very narrow use case for demos of AI chat. If you know Python and can run inference models on a colab then you can quickly whip up a demo UI with builtin components like chat with text and images. Arguably everyone is testing these apps so making them easy is cool for demo and prototyping. For anything more than a demo you don't use this.

What other use cases is this tool insufficient for?

BentoML already wins at model hosting in Python IMHO.

What limits this to demos?

IIRC there are a few ways to do ~ipywidgets with react patterns in notebooks, and then it's necessary to host notebooks for users with no online kernel, one kernel for all users (not safe), or a container/vm per user (Voila, JupyterHub, BinderHub, jupyter-repo2docker), or you can build a WASM app and host it statically (repo2jupyterlite,) so that users run their own code in their own browser.

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