Lately, I've been using Flask on the back-end, and React on the front-end.
As far as building APIs goes, Django Rest Framework provides so much. I find myself reinventing a lot when I use Flask vs Django + DRF. Just my 2¢.
I work on Flask stuff on purpose, because it means in the future I'll have more Flask work...
Flask is much more pythonic than django.
In fact, go look at Django's website/documentation, they don't have a hello world or a quickstart, they have like a 10-page tutorial to build some frankenstein nonsense, Flask's homepage has a 5 line application! That's how Python is supposed to be.
The more flask in the world, the better.
edit: now I've read some other people here saying Django gets easier after you use it, or it's gotten simpler... Flask is easy the first time you use it, and it's always been simple. Pythonic. End rant.
Flask actually has a tutorial just like this in the docs [1].
I think you should give Django a chance to be able to compare the two frameworks in these kinds of aspects.
For more serious projects, we use Flask for big commercial products and work and it's very good. Unlike some other tools, what I like about it is that it's very easy to look at the code in a Flask project and immediately understand what is going on.
1.https://medium.com/@lucperkins/web-development-in-c-crazy-or...
With GCC's ability to deploy to just about every architecture, most heavy-handed libraries using C themselves (hence a C FFI in higher languages), and access to the biggest and best GUI libs.
Add in musl and static compilation, you get:
* Probably fast
* Native UIs
* Tiny binaries that are easy to distribute
You get lots of great stuff out of the box. Perfect for me to get up and running quickly for simple/side projects.
Writing Ruby feels nice and is always a welcome change of pace from a lot of the heavy JS stuff I am doing on frontend atm.
When i have a new idea it takes me at max a hour to have to complete framework up and standing (Bootstrap/UI, User management, Databases, Deployment, ...) and i can start working on business logic.
Good solid base for quickly developing something quickly.
Iterating on a database schema has never been easier since 1.7 the migration tools are built in and the ecosystem of plugins has lots of tools that make development of a prototype extremely easy. It just keeps on getting better, just the other day I found an plugin to automatically generate knockout.js powered AJAX forms without me having to write any of the JavaScript.
If I need templates I'll add "HTML:Template", for email I'll add "Mail::Sendmail", et cetera, to my perl cgi script.
I too use Perl for most applications. These days I mostly use CGI::Application, which is great, although I've started to experiment with using Dancer (which is kinda like Ruby's sinatra framework) with success.
Normally, though, I like independent enforcement of data integrity, and PostgreSQL is free, easy to set up and maintain.
As a front-end developer I just can't warrant the time setting up a backend, setting up a database, defining routes, handling authentication and the other nonsense that seemingly takes a solid day to get working.
Firebase to me is the best choice for simple projects, I don't use anything else anymore.
The only downside I really see is once you leave the free tier you're at $25 / month minimum whereas I can run a small backend (or multiple small backends) on a $5 / month box. The difference really adds up if we're talking multiple small projects for multiple years.
Technical downside: backend processing and search & filtering are more involved.
Personal downside: Though I code in JavaScript, I'm no fan of it. Is there a good library in Go for it?
The ORM is really usable and simple CRUD apps are pretty easy after you've used it a few times. Django Admin for free is nice too.
Small hope/suggestion: I wish there was a free tier on Cloud SQL.
Yes I'm not cool :P but when did I care about being cool...
When I'm prototyping, my data model is stored procs that return json structures to the templates. I use SQLAlchemy core to connect to the db and execute the procs.
A prototype like this is super fast to get running, it gives you a really clean app structure that you can hand off to pretty much anyone and have them work on features, if you're lucky enough to have a team. If not, it's pretty easy to keep it all in your head at once.
As things grow, you can replace components as you need to.
You start off rendering JSON anyway, so if you need a more advanced interface up front, you can use React or Angular or Ember to hook into the data model. Whatever you want, really.
If things get more complex on the backend first and you need more structure there, you can refactor the SQL (because it was probably really gross the first time you wrote those "dump everything" procs). If you end up with a really complicated data model, you may have to eat the performance hit and switch to Alchemy proper for maintainability. Either way, the choice is yours.
Sometimes the simple app is the one you need, and the biggest challenge is scaling quickly. That's easy too because the database handles transactions inside the procs. Run one instance of the app per core on your server and put them all behind nginx and repeat on as many machines as you need to cover your traffic needs behind HAProxy. Now you're maximizing multi-core performance per machine without having to write async/await code.
It's probably not for everyone, but I find it gives me an enormous amount of flexibility, scales well in every sense of the word, allows the app to develop organically, and has very few drawbacks.
You take an arbitrary Ring-compatbile HTTP server, write a handler, and glue together whatever you need to. And you most likely don't need a routing library, you can just use an array-map for that. When it is time to deploy, you create a jar that contains your whole project and upload it to AWS.
Rollback is easy, too, as you don't overwrite your previous version. Funny enough, it means you can treat versions as immutable values of your application over time. I use yyyymmdd for versioning in most projects, that works great with this approach.
There are many discussions on virtues of Clojure's dynamic development environment, so I'll skip that.
I am a sysadmin. I like Perl and its plethora of modules. With Mojolicious, I can write a simple web app/prototype within the hour.
It's now cross-platform and there's an Azure free tier.
Of course, other people can get similar productivity within their own most familiar stacks :) (someone mentioned an hour for a similar setup with Rails)
Going to give crystal a go for my next project though.
