Topics

• Anvil: Full Stack Web with Nothing but Python
  By: Meredydd Luff
  Experience Level: Intermediate
  Length: 45 Minutes
  Description:

  Building a modern web app requires so much: HTML, CSS, JS, Python, SQL, React, Bootstrap, Webpack, Django... What if we could build a better abstraction?

  In this talk, I'll introduce Anvil, a full-stack Python environment where everything is a Python object, from your UI components to your database rows. I'll walk you through how and why we constructed this new approach to the web.

  We'll start with a question: Why is web programming hard? It's because your data takes so many forms: database rows, Python objects, JSON on REST, JS objects, HTML DOM, and finally pixels. Most of a web developer's job is translating between these awkwardly different representations. Frameworks like Django help, but now you have a stack of leaky abstractions: web frameworks, ORMs, JS frameworks, CSS frameworks, build tools... These frameworks help you go faster, but they double the amount you need to know!

  So I'll show our stab at an answer: A framework where everything is a Python object, requests to the server are function calls, and Python is a browser-side language. I'll talk about running Python in the browser. I'll talk about full-stack autocompletion. There will even be live coding.