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Rio: Web apps in pure Python

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Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#91

Post by Sn3llius »

igtztorrero wrote: post #36

Good for python developers without JavaScript knowledge, but your app will be attached to a fixed same graphic style.

Rio dev here. You're right in that all Rio components use Material Design, but there is still room for configuration. I can't post pictures here, but if you check our discord, somebody has made a full-retro website that doesn't look material-y at all.

In addition to high-level components there's also some very basic building blocks, like a humble Rectangle. By combining these in clever ways you can get more styles than you might originally expect - just like everything on the web is ultimately colored boxes.

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#92

Post by Sn3llius »

joshdavham wrote: post #90

Looks cool! But I'm wondering who the target audience is. Most web devs prefer javascript. Are you hoping to target data scientists to build data apps, for example?

Exactly! We've seen from personal experience just how many people are currently working on AI/datascience projects and would love to create UIs for them, but just can't. That's exactly who Rio is for - people who are experts in one field, and don't want to invest hours and hours into other languages just to create interfaces for what they're working on.

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#93

Post by robertoandred »

surfingdino wrote: post #60

It's amazing how much you can build without resorting to those fancy frameworks if you dedicate some time to learning Django and how its views work. You do not need a SPA, you need a working app that looks good.

Why would I want to dedicate time to learning Django when I can just use a simple React framework?

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#94

Post by Sn3llius »

davepeck wrote: post #66

I'm excited to see more projects like Rio exploring the full-stack python web dev space. There are definitely categories of users for which the approach makes sense. --- For me personally -- and I'm guessing for a bunch of other HNers -- writing full-stack web apps strictly in python is a non-goal. I've settled on a comfortable (for me) stack for smaller projects that need python on the backend that combines: 1. Lite…

Rio dev here. I 100% agree with you. We aren't expecting for JS developers to flock to rio en-masse. Instead, we're targeting the many, many Python devs that have been completely left out in the web revolution and are still stuck construcing user-interfaces using tkinter and similar.

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#95

Post by explorigin »

pjmlp wrote: post #12

This kind "you don't need JavaScript, HTML and CSS" approach always fails flat. We already went down this route several times since the first dotcom wave and all the frameworks that tried to target the browser as if we don't need to know "JavaScript, HTML and CSS". Until we need to debug the application, or why it isn't rendering as it should. It is also why I am not a big fan of Blazor, even though I admire its engi…

Streamlit seems to be doing ok.

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#96

Post by Sn3llius »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #79
bee_rider wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python lists aren’t arrays, right? They are the closest thing in Python to an array maybe, but they do a ton of stuff under the hood, like grow when needed. Calling them arrays would be very confusing to everybody who expects a typical array: a pointer with some empty space after it.

Yeah and no? Python Lists indeed don't make any sort of array-like guarantee, but they're implemented as a vector/autogrowing-array of python object references (but these objects are not guaranteed to be cache-local). The implementation defines the underlying data structure as PyObject *ob_item

List access is O(1), which effectively makes them arrays :)

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#97

Post by Sn3llius »

bee_rider wrote: post #72
Sn3llius wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't see ourselves as Python bindings for the web, but instead as a pythonic way to create apps. I understand that "span" has become a well known name amongst web developers, that's just not something most new developers understand. Think of it like how Python has renamed a lot of things. What other languages call arrays, Python calls lists. HashTables are dicts, and so on. Python has faced a lot of resistance he…

Python lists aren’t arrays, right? They are the closest thing in Python to an array maybe, but they do a ton of stuff under the hood, like grow when needed. Calling them arrays would be very confusing to everybody who expects a typical array: a pointer with some empty space after it.

Most languages have arrays that grow automatically. I'd say C/C++ is the exception there.

When I said array, I specifically meant O(1) access, which is in contrast to linked lists, which the name "list" would seem to imply.

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#99

Post by rmbyrro »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #49
red_hare wrote: post #24

These frameworks are cute, and I understand the desire to avoid the modern SPA JavaScript build systems, but it always seems like so much more work than just writing HTML. I swear, HTML/CSS + Flask + HTMX gets you so far these days. Then, you can throw in some AlpineJS for any inter-element interaction you need and build a responsive SPA without almost any JavaScript.

Alpine is great for your blog, but it's not even a little bit tempting for real world professional projects. Looking back at every project I've worked on there's no shot I would ever select Alpine for any of them. These type of condescending comments really scream "I'm not even a web developer but here's my strong opinion as someone who only makes toy front ends to demo my data work"

An undesired level of condescendence for a message against it, no? My first impression...

Re: Rio: Web apps in pure Python

#100

Post by mrweasel »

surfingdino wrote: post #60

It's amazing how much you can build without resorting to those fancy frameworks if you dedicate some time to learning Django and how its views work. You do not need a SPA, you need a working app that looks good.

In general I'm not convinced that these "no Javacript" frameworks will last, and to some extend you going to have to re-learn a lot. That's not to say that the idea isn't interesting.

While I have no idea how this would work, I think it would be more useful to have tools like this as a sort of template language for something like Django or Flask. So you get the mature frameworks on the backend and something like Rio to generate the backend, within the context of Django/Flask/Bottle/whatever.

Some modern web applications do need VueJS, React, something like that. CRUD apps mostly don't, but we are way past CRUD apps for a lot of thing. You can maybe get away with calling Asana and Jira CRUD apps, but you can't do Figma with just Django.

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