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Litestar is worth a look

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Re: Litestar is worth a look

#41

Post by rtpg »

rmonvfer wrote: post #36
rtpg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really disappointed at the new generation of Python frameworks' documentation, which seem to have the same "docs are tutorials + chatty blog posts which imprecisely describe the APIs" attitude of Javascript libs. Two words: API Reference. Have the clinical explanation of methods exposed, with actual breakdowns of what method parameters do. List them all, don't surround it by prose. List out the options! Don't ma…

This, I’ve already said it in another reply but FastAPI is 10x harder to use because of this. I’ve had to read FastAPI code many times to literally reverse engineer features because they are not documented in any way. Documentation is for reference, tutorials are for learning, I just don’t even understand how maintainers don’t go crazy with the absolute lack of references… And SQL Model is even worse in that regard.

maintainers just having to assume every behavior is needed for backwards compatibility... and you still have the absolute mess which was pydantic 1 -> 2 (or django-ninja 0.x -> 1.0)

Everyone talks about moving fast and being dynamic but everyone I know deep in this has lost like actual years to churning from this kind of behavior.

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#42

Post by croemer »

canadiantim wrote: post #40
rmonvfer wrote: post #22

Thank you for writing this, I've been building a large backend with FastAPI for the last year or so and I've gone through all the levels of the purgatory. I began using the standard "tutorial" style and started cringing when I saw the official template [1] place all CRUD operations in a single file (I've been doing Rails and Spring for a while before) and the way dependencies where managed... let's just say I wasn't…

Doesn't Litestar suffer from some of this too? Do you think Litestar would be better for building complex applications than FastAPI, despite less community adoption / documentation / discussion?

Is there really less documentation? FastAPI mostly has tutorials to get started and is light on deep/reference material. A single person can only do so much.

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#43

Post by canadiantim »

croemer wrote: post #42
canadiantim wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Litestar suffer from some of this too? Do you think Litestar would be better for building complex applications than FastAPI, despite less community adoption / documentation / discussion?

Is there really less documentation? FastAPI mostly has tutorials to get started and is light on deep/reference material. A single person can only do so much.

Documentation-wise I'm mainly comparing to Django, because I agree FastAPI actually quite light on reference docs too.

I've actually tried using litestar before and always been keeping an eye on it, but for a full fledged website needing forms, auth, etc. I find it hard to move away from just slightly tweaking Django for my needs - but still I feel drawn to Litestar as it's in between FastAPI and Django but still much closer to the former. I hope/believe in time I will feel comfortable migrating to Litestar for complex sites

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#44

Post by jaza »

Nice write-up! I've heard about Litestar now and then, haven't tried it, maybe I should give it a go. I've been using FastAPI quite heavily for the past several years.

I think OP's arguments about FastAPI being hard to work with in a bigger codebase are exaggerated. Splitting up the routes into multiple files, each with its own route object, and then importing and building up a big hierarchy of route objects, isn't that hard, it does the job for me. Agreed that it's probably not well documented enough, how to structure a larger FastAPI codebase - but follow a mix of best practices and your personal tastes, break it up into modules, split it into specific files for constants / errors / routes / schemas / crud / etc, and you can scale up sanely.

I haven't used SQLAlchemy with FastAPI - for my day job I mainly connect to data stores for which it doesn't make sense - so maybe I'm biased, because I've avoided that pain.

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#45

Post by [deleted] »

miki123211 wrote: post #29
rmonvfer wrote: post #22

Thank you for writing this, I've been building a large backend with FastAPI for the last year or so and I've gone through all the levels of the purgatory. I began using the standard "tutorial" style and started cringing when I saw the official template [1] place all CRUD operations in a single file (I've been doing Rails and Spring for a while before) and the way dependencies where managed... let's just say I wasn't…

TBH, the FastAPI "docs" are at https://github.com/polarsource/polar/tree/main/server If you want to actually figure out how to scale FastAPI for a large-ish app, including auth, testing and all that stuff, all with modern practices, "how they do it in that repo" is probably a good way to start with.

[deleted]

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#46

Post by hangonhn »

andrewstuart wrote: post #24

I love Starlette but not a fan of FastAPI and do not use it. I read this article but didn’t really get the sense there was anything sufficiently compelling to switch from Starlette.

Huge fan of Starlette too. I use it for all my projects at work. That said, for some of my coworkers, I’ve pointed them to Litestar because it’s very similar to Starlette (I think it was originally built on it) but it has dependencies injection. It’s an useful feature for some projects.

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#47

Post by baggiponte »

Litestar is really underrated but deserves much more usage! I’ve been meaning to try it for at least a year now, but always felt a bit scary to tell the team “hey let’s deviate from our stack”

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#49

Post by kreelman »

rmonvfer wrote: post #22

Thank you for writing this, I've been building a large backend with FastAPI for the last year or so and I've gone through all the levels of the purgatory. I began using the standard "tutorial" style and started cringing when I saw the official template [1] place all CRUD operations in a single file (I've been doing Rails and Spring for a while before) and the way dependencies where managed... let's just say I wasn't…

I'm starting out with API style apps. This post was great since it covered several architectural and tool points I'd not thought of.

I think I'll use LiteStar for my app now too.

Thanks for your good comment and I 2nd your thanks to the author.

Re: Litestar is worth a look

#50

Post by holler »

zokier wrote: post #27

I know fastapi gets the hype, but I have found plain starlette quite usable by itself. Sure, it doesn't have the whole kitchen sink, but if you just need something small and simple then it fits the bill. In comparison Litestar seems closer to fastapi/django in scope

Same, I've built all my recent api's in Starlette alone and I find it excellent. It's clean, concise, well documented, and you can extend it as needed, supporting small -> very large projects.
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