ANFSCD: Revisiting the Web Server

Nearly two years ago, I was considering which Python web framework to use for a user interface to Postgres: CherryPy, Flask, Werkzeug? Not entirely satisfied with the choices, I started reviewing even more frameworks thinking I might want to write my own minimalist framework.

Several months later, somebody (through Planet Python, IIRC) referred me to a presentation by Jacob Kaplan-Moss on the history and future of Python on the web. Surprisingly, halfway through the talk Jacob started raving about Meteor, a pure JavaScript framework, saying “we’re deluding ourselves if we think this [something like Meteor] is not the future of web applications.” This prompted me to take a close look at Meteor and several other JS frameworks.

Tarek Ziadé’s “A new development era” essay reinforced this change in direction. Ultimately, I settled on AngularJS as the (client) framework. Two-way data binding, dependency injection and testability are some of the features that won me over.

Angular opened the door to the Node.js world—which appears somewhat chaotic compared to Python’s (and even more to the staidness of Postgres). Like Python, Node.js has an abundance of web frameworks, templating libraries and other tools to choose from (and master). Aside from that, are there any negatives in continuing down this path?

For one, although Angular is an open source project, unlike Python and PostgreSQL, its destiny is controlled by a behemoth. A saving grace is its large community of contributors. And perhaps some of Angular’s innovations may eventually become part of standard HTML.

Second, in spite of Selena Deckelmann’s recent comments on JS and PG, I’m strongly partial to Python and not fond of JavaScript as an implementation language. It’s liberating not to have to use braces (and semicolons) for code structure! To compensate, CoffeeScript appears to be the obvious alternative.

When it comes to interfacing to Postgres, although I haven’t explored it enough to do justice, node-postgres doesn’t seem to be up to par with psycopg, and I’m not about to throw away the work I’ve done on Pyrseas, in particular the TTM-inspired interface. So Werkzeug may still play a part, as a Postgres-Python-to-JSON service, particularly now that it support Python 3. However, for contrast I will use node-postgres in an early implementation.

Last, the Angular team’s choice for “workflow” tool (Yeoman) did not sit well with me: I don’t care for “scaffolding” and my first experience with Grunt rubbed me the wrong way. Fortunately, in the Node.js “chaos” I found Brunch, which although not without problems, looks suitable for my purposes.

Having addressed the negatives, I’ve started work on this at GitHub, and plan to post more about it later on.

Update: Due to the change in direction, I was wondering whether I should also change the title of this blog to something like “Taming Serpents, Pachyderms and White A’s in Red Shields”, but fortunately I discovered that at least O’Reilly uses a rhinoceros as the JavaScript mascot and rhinos are considered pachyderms. 🙂