I am working on an Ember-Rails app. I have used Yeoman previously for building non-ember-rails apps and js plugins and I would love to be able to realize the benefits of Yeoman (especially Grunt's livereload) when working on my Ember-Rails projects. However, I am unsure as to whether Ember, Rails, and Yeoman are fully compatible and whether they overlap in their roles and responsibilities. For example:
Dependency Management
- I understand Bower is used for dependency management. Does Bower affect how assets are loaded through the rails asset pipeline? What are the advantages/disadvantages of loading dependencies through Bower instead of using Rails gems?
Livereload
- Does livereload function with a single-page app (like one built in Ember) in the same way it does with a multi-page app (for example, an html site that doesn't use a js framework)? Are individual models/views/controllers reloaded or does the whole app reload and/or recompile through the Rails asset pipeline?
Existing Project
- Are there pitfalls when integrating Yeoman into an existing Ember-Rails app? We're running Ember 1.3.0-beta and Ember Data 1.0.0-beta on our production. If you have experience with up-to-date Ember builds, are Ember-auth and Ember-data compatible with Yeoman?
If anyone has experience combining Ember, Rails, and Yeoman, or if you understand how the frontend and backend would compare with such a stack please share your thoughts! Would you recommend just integrating part of the Yeoman setup (e.g. Grunt) with an Ember-Rails app instead of the whole of Yeoman?
Thanks.
I'm not Rails&Ember guy, but here are my general thoughts about feasibility of using Yeoman:
Not using Yeoman: Feasibility
From my experience in combining Yeoman & Django, I must say that it starts to pay off only in medium-sized or bigger projects.
In smaller ones, particularly with tight deadlines and not much attention paid to the code quality & tech. solutions used (like Univ. projects), you'll be probably better off sticking with bare Rails (downloading JS libraries manually and committing them accordingly to the Rails project structure).
The reason is simple: It might be really time-consuming to fine tune both full-stack framework (Rails) with frontend-framework (Yeoman).
Particularly if Rails is driven by CoC principle.
It might seem to work after some setup, but as the project evolves, you will spot further obstacles and you'll have to tamper waaaaaaay more.
Cons & things I consider not worth this time investment:
Livereload
I like it very much, I was amazed with it at first, but after some time I see that I don't spend that much time editing HTML&CSS in IDE and watching static page on another screen automatically refresh. In majority of cases I still need to do Alt + tab and trigger some action, perform some click, so whether I add one Ctrl+R hit in-between doesn't do any difference.
In some cases you'll be better off playing around with Local Folders Mappings (Chrome Dev Tools) or web proxy (e.g.: Fiddler).
There are cases where Livereload does a brilliant job though, such as for instance not needing to perform full reload if you edited only CSS.
As for your questions:
For me if it detects changes in JS it reloads whole page. But maybe it's because I'm using JetBrains IDEs (filesystem cache'ing) and CoffeScript (compilation to JS).
Yeoman is best suited for SPAs. Would it be acceptable for you to make it a SPA, not a round trip app ?
Bower - Attempt to provide dependency management for github projects
What bower does for your app is basically downloading stuff from github. No rocket science here.
If the structure of downloaded thing is non-standard, Bower/RequireJS/Grunt-bower-install has no bloody idea what to do with it next, i.e. how to inject everything so that you won't get errors. For most popular libraries bower just works, for highly customized ones you will end up injecting downloaded stuff manually.
The ones to blame are people who don't package useful github projects properly.
Furthermore I heard of workflows where people commit bower_components due to problems with bower, never experienced personally though, perhaps the issues were fixed. If so possibility of not committing 3rd libraries to source code is definitely an advantage.
Note: As I pointed out above, it's how bower helps you developing your app, but bower has become somewhat a standard in the frontend community, for instance http://ngmodules.org/ is build on top of that, so it's a important tool.
Can Rails assembly pipeline fetch arbitrary github project ? Yes.
Can it inject library references to your html ? Duno, I'm not Rails guy.
Generators
Some could do a beautiful job, such as configuring whole heroku-related stuff for you. Too bad generator-heroku doesn't work as expected (tried it sth like 2 months ago). Same was true for travis generator. In this case fix was easy, but see the next point.
As for Angular generators (I'm Angular guy, not Ember guy, sorry :-) ) - it just adds 2 files and includes them in index.html, furthermore if you are using not so straight-forward syntax for creating JS framework related stuff (sample: Angular-related stuff in coffee) generator will most probably not know about it. Ok, you can submit a patch to generator, but then AngularJS team decides to change the syntax a little bit in the next release - you get the idea ? - again, see the next point.
What is more, if your project uses layout in which code is structured by feature/module (e.g. admin module, profile settings module, ...), not by type (directives, controllers, ...) framework-specific generators won't work.
Stability
Karma is evolving rapidly, so does Angular, Angular-UI and loads of fronted tools, frameworks.
It's really difficult for Yeoman to keep up with most recent changes, although they do a nice job here.
Employing Yeoman: Being cutting-edge
Yeoman provides some really cool stuff such as:
Linting
Compiling coffeescript, SASS/SCSS, etc. on the fly
CDNifying
Really useful when you want to have libraries downloaded locally in case of developing offline and still benefit from pros of CDN.
Without Grunt you would have ended up writing scripts parsing your HTMLs
Automated JS/CSS minification
Grunt does it for you. You only have to configure it properly.
Encouraging separation and low coupling of your frontend and backend
As for your question: I doubt that you'll be able to manage Rails part solely with Yeoman.
A good recipe for a web app in Yeoman & sth is: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19425461/1432478.
That's for Django, adapt it accordingly to Rails.
My opinion
In majority of small projects based purely on Spring MVC, Rails, Django, etc. you simply don't perform any of things done by Grunt (hence there's less time expenditure for setup).
There are cases when producing technologically advanced frontend is a must.
e.g.: Most recently I discovered that my bank account management system doesn't minify JSes. Even funny comments are left as they were. I didn't perform any rushed money withdrawal, but I hope they at least have server-side validation. :-)
Yeoman is a really good combination of solutions facilitating all those chores.
Using only Grunt? IMHO No. Yeoman is Grunt when it comes to app assembly. You get Livereload and other stuff for free.
If:
you're lucky and found sample config that seems to work for the web framework of your choice or managed to configure one on your own
don't have deadlines to hold
then you should probably give it a try.
If you will work on multiple projects, chore of configuring it once might pay off by copy-pasting config to future projects.
But keep in mind that frontend technologies are rapidly evolving, that's why tons of samples from the net simply don't work out of the box.
Further reading :)
http://blog.tfnico.com/2013/07/considerations-for-javascript-in-modern.html
Java world here, but I hope some concepts will be useful:
http://addyosmani.com/blog/making-maven-grunt/
Javascript web app and Java server, build all in Maven or use Grunt for web app?
Related
i am a new Webdeveloper and im struggeling to find the right tools and frameworks to use for the specific site i am building.
Its a site for managing all kind of information and documents about clients my firm cares for.
It consists of general information (like statistics etc.) that should be served synchronously and a client specific part that should be a SPA (mainly because i want to have a list of all clients on the side, so that the main part of the page updates when you click one).
My problem is , that there is so much information about that kind of stuff (but not specificly a project comparable to mine), so that i can't decide what the best approach would be.
I found those options so far:
Just serve everything with django and update reactive parts of the page with Ajax
building a dedicated Frontend and with Frameworks like Svelte or React and using Django as API.
Using these Frameworks just for the critical components that have to be reactive and serving everything with django
If i understand correctly, the cleanest way would be Nr. 2, but i would lose access to djangos form rendering with crispy_forms (which, for a website consisting mainly of forms, would kinda suck).
The same is kinda true for Option 3 i think, since the critical Elements are mostly forms. And as far is i know you cant render django forms as react components.
I was discouraged from using Option 1, cause it seems to very error-prone to build a SPA without a framework.
I would really appreciate some input from more experienced People like me to help me with the decicion which path to go down.
Greetings!
There are many options, but it all depends on your knowledge and deadline.
Don't try to make everything perfect at once. Make an MVP using the technologies that you are familiar with and show the working version to the management. I'm sure there will be many edits and improvements that they will want to implement.
If you need an advise about stack, then you can look at Django + DRF + Vue.js
I'm fairly new to both Django and Angular. I recognize this is subjective and there are likely many ways to do it, but I'm wondering what best practices people can recommend for laying out such an application. I'm specifically thinking of the case of rich, SPA with the backend being mostly or entirely a RESTful API server, but then I'd like to have a common approach for any apps that serve significant views from Django. (I haven't done enough to decide if the latter warrants using Angular or may be more trouble than its worth).
Specifically:
What are pros/cons of maintaining the front-end code in a separate directory/repository from the backend versus, say, inside a "static" subdirectory of the Django app? In my case I'm the sole developer for now, which has some impact on this decision, but I can still consider myself separate "teams" of back-end, front-end, designer, etc. in the sense that my workflow will put me in one of these roles at a time.
My setup is basically a development machine, SCM in GitHub, and hosted publicly on WebFaction (shared web hosting). I will down the line want to easily grab projects on different development machines, but the primary workflow is just one dev, one prod installation. That said, I'm interested in best practices in real-world projects as I hope a future job may be working with Django.
ADDED: Another point I'm very unsure about is whether the Angular app should/must be bootstrapped by Django. That is, should the front page be served by Django and injected with any data?
PROS:
Can configure URL paths and even API endpoints that change from dev to production, without any alternate config and without these being hard-coded in front-end.
This is maybe necessary for authentication? Unclear to me having not done this yet...
Allows use of tools like the Django debug toolbar app.
CONS:
Couples the front-end to the back-end. What If I want to swap out the latter? What if I want the front-end to work in a sandbox with mock data?
Seems to strongly favor moving all Angular stuff into the Django app layout. At the same time, I don't like having a mix of Angular partials in one place and Django template(s) in another. I am already resolved not to mix NG and DJ templates, as I don't believe much good will come of this.
I also started as solo developer on Django as BE with AngularJS FE. I've put AngularJS files in static folder and everything is fine.
Cons are definitely that you have FE and BE mixed up in one project, but I think that shouldn't matter since you are solo developer. Even if you decide once to hire additional developer (to split FE and BE work) your work wouldn't have any conflicts since one of you would work totally independent.
One of the pros for me is definitely I did entire login process via Django (templating as well) and once login went fine I served rest of the FE (entire AngularJS part).
For Django REST I've used TastyPie. It's great REST enhancement for Django and easy to set up.
I would like to avoid to manage a big index.html file containing all my handlebars template.
I read multiple blogs with different solutions but I'm not sure of the best one.
Is there someone from the official ember.js team able to provide the best practice for this ?
Is grunt the best solution ?
Currently I do not use any special backend like node.js. Only a basic http apache server. The REST API is provided by a Tomcat server
IMO if you are not a rails developer then one of the best option would be indeed grunt or much better yeoman (http://yeoman.io/). Using the generator-ember (https://github.com/yeoman/generator-ember) and yeoman togheter will get you up and running in no time. For example after installing yeoman and the generator-ember you can create a full project structure with a simple yo ember, this will create all the necessary folder for views/controller/routes/templates where you can start coding right away. You should give it a try.
Edit
As stated in the comment of #Toran Billups, the ember core team is working on this project (https://github.com/stefanpenner/ember-app-kit) which will be grunt based and it will work using modules and much more awesome stuff.
Hope it helps.
I've worked with XAMPP, WAMPP, MAMPP, etc and am starting to look at Django.
A majority of the work we do is very CMS orientated; although we've been told not to use third-party CMS' (mainly because of user's find them hard to use, and other issues), I've found that I can code a very simple CMS using Cake, CodeIgniter or one of the other PHP frameworks.
And yet, I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the amount of coding I need to do just to get something up and running, and I've been told that Django is a good Python framework to use. It also seems to get a lot of buzz from reddit.
I have some concerns and queries about moving from XAMPP to Django.
1) Security
Any web app should be coded defensively. Over the past few years we've seen a movement towards protecting against XSS, SQL injections, Cross site forgeries, session fixation, session hi-jacking, cookie hi-jacking; the amount of security one needs can be overwhelming.
What things does Django do to prevent/limit XSS, SQL injections, Javascript injections, and santizing input; one normally associates with securing PHP web apps? Is it something I need to worry about, or does Django do all this stuff out of the box.
2) What goes in the /www/ public folder?
In a manual I read it said not to put manage.py or the other .py stuff in the main webroot, so this means I put everything outside of the webroot; so what goes in there?
Do I put the /templates/ directory inside the webroot? How does the server know what to run?
3) Can I still use .htaccess on Django projects? I am familiar with Apache and often use it to do routing, or blocking off bad bots, but will using .htaccess still work?
4) Cronjobs
Do cronjobs still work with Python/Django projects?
5) Running Third party perl/other scripts
In PHP you can use other libraries such as the curl library, ffmpeg, ImageMagik as well as many others; can I still use these libraries with Python/Django?
6) Admin screen
Django gives you an out-of-the-box admin screen; is this only for development purposes or can it put live? I am concerned about any the security of the admin screen.
7) Integration with Discuss, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, captcha, etc.
There are libraries in PHP that help integrate DisQuss, Facebook, Twitter; but is it relatively easy to do an integration with these and other third party apps?
8) E-commerce, SSL
Are there many e-commerce sites that use Django? I've seen a lot of CMS/Blog type software but not many e-commerce sites. By which I mean, shopping card, Protx/Paypal or Worldpay integration.
That's another thing; there are sandboxes for Protx, Paypal, Worldpay etc for PHP -- but are there any for Django?
9) Is it worth it?
Is it worth moving to Django from an XAMPP background? Will it really make things faster, or is that just marketing hype?
Thanks.
Security. The Django core team are very security-conscious, and have taken great care to make things like SQL injection impossible. The next version, 1.2, includes a whole new cross-site request forgery protection library. Obviously, you still need to be aware of these when developing your application, but Django does a lot to help you.
What goes under /www/public: Nothing. Django doesn't work via the normal Apache serving mechanism: it hooks into (preferably) mod_wsgi, which needs a single file which then tells it to run the rest of the code. The templates can go anywhere, and are pointed to by your Django settings file, but again aren't served directly by Apache.
.htaccess: You don't really need it, because of point 2: you're not serving things in a filesystem hierarchy. The best way to do it is to set up vhosts and manage things that way.
Cron jobs: Absolutely. Django is just Python, and you can easily run Python scripts via cron. Django allows you to set up custom command scripts which initialise the ORM and give you access to anything you would need.
Libraries: Again, because Django is Python, you get access to the huge amount of Python libraries that are out there. For curl, Python has urllib; for ImageMagick, it has PIL; and no doubt there are equivalents of ffmpeg too.
Admin: Again, security has been thought of from the beginning. Opinions differ as to whether you should use the admin only for your expert users, or customise it and allow access for all users; I've had a lot of success using it as the basis for my custom CMS interfaces.
Facebook, etc: Yes, there are libraries for all of these.
E-commerce: There is a whole e-commerce project, Satchmo, written in Django. Libraries exist to interface with all the payment providers.
Is it worth it? Only you can tell. My experience working alongside a range of developers who have moved from PHP is that they've enjoyed the experience and became much more productive.
On SQL Injections: Django uses an ORM, which takes care of SQL injection protection, and you will rarely write you own SQL. If you do, just follow the instructions on how to pass parameters to raw queries and prevent SQL Injections.
There is an entire chapter on the django book about security that should answer all your questions.
On what goes into /www/: anything that is not code? The concern is to not put the python code there.
On .htaccess: Yes, it should still work (for any non Django resources as Daniel points out).
On cronjobs: what do you mean?
On Libraries: Python - the language you will use with Django - is rich in libraries that probably provide the same functionality you are used to. This is a key point: you will need to learn Python well to benefit the most from Django.
On the admin interface: This is actually the thing that will probably help you the most, judging from your question. They are customizable (within some limits) and they really give the staff (it is not intended for public users, but for staff users) the basics of CRUD for your database models. It is a time saver. You might need to write your own templates for advanced functionality, but for most simple CRUD aimed at staff (which is usually the point of a CMS) it is very useful and easy to set up.
On integration: Check Pinax for a group of applications that provide extra functionality. There is a rich and diverse universe of integration solutions out there. It is not unusual to find questions here in SO about django + facebook and others.
On E-commerce: Check Satchmo out.
Is it worth it: Now, I have no experience with XAMPP. I know that I like Python better than both Perl and PHP (and Java, for that matter). I know that as a framework Django is simpler to use, faster to deploy than anything I used before.
My suggestion is the age old: go build a simple project and make up your own mind. You are the only one in position to decide if Django is the framework for you.
An older question on SO discusses some Django limitations. My answer to that might be helpful to you too.
I recently moved to developing any new projects in Django, coming from a PHP background. Here are my thoughts on your questions.
1) Security
Strings sent to templates is escaped by default, which takes care of most of that. Since you're using an ORM, SQL injection shouldn't be an issue unless you build raw queries for some reason.
2) What goes in the /www/ public folder?
Django doesn't use a file hierarchy for URLs like a typical PHP setup. The server knows what to run from your urls.py and settings.py pointer to the template folder.
3) Can I still use .htaccess on Django projects? I am familiar with Apache and often use it to do routing, or blocking off bad bots, but will using .htaccess still work?
As noted above, it works for static content just the same. For dynamic pages, you'd want to implement some other form of authentication or redirection for clients you want to block, as far as I know.
4) Cronjobs
There's no reason why you can't use cron for whatever, as you still have a normal Linux system.
5) Running Third party perl/other scripts
You'll want to use the Python versions of those libraries, of course. For instance
FFMpeg
PythonMagick
I replaced most of my need for Curl with the built-in urllib and urrlib2 libraries, but there is also PyCurl if you need it.
6) Admin screen
The Admin screen is intended to be used by your own admins, i.e. site staff. It may be possible to do so, but it's not supposed to be the scaffolding on which you build your public facing project.
7) Integration with Discuss, Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, captcha, etc.
There are a lot of people out there using Python and Django, and I haven't had any problem finding libraries. In my experience there is a bit less support for something than PHP, but what is there is often higher quality.
8) E-commerce, SSL
I haven't tried payment integration, so I can't say. Not sure about the other sites, but the Paypal Sandbox is run by Paypal, isn't it? I don't think it's related to what you're using on the server, so sure, you can access it like normal.
9) Is it worth it? Is it worth moving to Django from an XAMPP background? Will it really make things faster, or is that just marketing hype?
I moved to Django because Python is truly a more compelling language than PHP. Will it make things faster? I'm not sure what the advantages in that respect would be for Django vs.the PHP MVC frameworks. There are no magic bullets.
You do have to keep in mind that you're not just learning a new framework, but also a new language. There will be a bit of a learning curve if you've never used Python before. but I've found both Python and Django to be fairly easy to learn. The clean design of the language is fantastic and Django is veryt well designed, too. I do feel that it's boosting my productivity. I've found snippets for or articles about most everything I need to do in Django as I've been learning, so adapting has been pretty simple.
I'm a C++ developer with basic Python skills. Here's the task, a friend of mine is running a small company and he asked me if I can make a website for him. I have no real deadline so I think it's a perfect opportunity to try sth new and do some web development.
User has to be able to add photos, change texts ect.
Do you think that Django would be an overkill for this kind of project? I have no experience with it. Perhaps I should try to customize some blog engine or Google Sites?
You may be interested in Google App Engine (http://code.google.com/appengine) which recently exhibited a rise in popularity. The application runs on Google's servers, eliminating the need to maintain Apache and worry about up-time. You basically get a Django-based solution with a data store, with an SDK which allows you to conveniently develop an application on your desktop and then upload it to appspot.com for everyone to use.
The documentation is great, and even if you eventually decide not to use it, the tutorial is excellent for getting you up to speed on Python and webapp design. There is also a codelab which contains a simple Wiki example.
If you need to set up quickly a very simple website, Wordpress can be the perfect choice.
Wordpress is born as a blogging platform, but in the newer version you can manage pages, contact form and so on. And you can find good plugins to expand its capabilities.
The administration interface of wordpress is clean and easy to use, the page or article editor is simple and powerful. Add an image in a post or in a page is easy and intuitive as in no other opensource CMS I've seen.
Django is a pretty flexible framework, it tends to scale well both up and down. It may be overkill to have to learn the whole API for just a simple site, but if you're looking to learn something new, and have some time to spare, then it's a fun platform to learn and work from. My suggestion would be to install the API and have a play around with it, read the Django book and see how you get on.
Maybe before diving into Joomla or Django a first step should be working with the technologies in a raw, pure way. Create a simple web page that excutes some server side script (python? php?) that retrieves data from a mySQL database and displays it. Throw in a little javascript too. Just so that you feel comfortable with the bare-bones fundamentals.
Then when you dive into the big frameworks and libraries, they won't seem so magical.
If you're really asking what the best tool for the job is, then you are going to have to give a little more detail than "first small web project." If what you are asking is more along the lines of you want to learn web application development and what you already know is C++ and python so what would be a good web application stack where you can leverage your current skillset, then here are some more suggestions.
Django is pretty cool. Every one has already talked about it here. As mentioned earlier, the google app engine is sort of based on Django.
Also, consider zope which is another python based web application container.
If you wanted to leverage your C++ knowledge instead, then consider Wt.
Why don't you take a look at the hello world examples for all three and decide which one looks the most interesting to you?
There are a multitude of website frameworks and kits that you could go with as opposed to starting development work from the ground up. It really depends on what kind of technology you want to go with, and how comfortable you feel with the language's potential. As mentioned above, there are things like Joomla, and If you want to stick to PhP frameworks, you could also use Drupal, which has a ton of documentation and support, and is relatively easy to understand.
If you want to venture into the Microsoft realm, you could look into DotNetNuke. It too is much like Drupal and Joomla, so it's a nice CMS framework, which you might feel more comfortable with since ASP.Net is based off of a programming language as opposed to a a scripting language, unlike Classic ASP or PhP. If you're going to go the Microsoft route, I also recommend taking a look at their BizSpark developer program - but that's more dependent on how serious your friend is on running his site as a business.
Then you also have a lot of things offered up by Google, such as their charts and visualizations -- which doesn't seems like something you're looking for, but for future reference, or cool little things like a map mashup.
It really depends on how much you're willing to learn and how much time you have and sometimes not having a rough deadline is the worst possible thing that could happen. Naturally everything starts to take longer. By the time you're done, the tech is either out of date, or you've taken so long that the business plan has changed.
using django it is easy, there is already an application for photo albums available at http://code.google.com/p/django-photologue/ it becomes with tagging too and maybe you just need to add some jquery effects to get done your site.
To get this done you just create a django project, add the applications to your settings, configure your urls and templates, and thats it.
Also i f you need a small version you can just use this code as a base of your new app.
have fun with django!!
sergio
Pylons is an excellent Python web framework based on WSGI standard. It has ported many of the features of Ruby on Rails so is great for rapid development.
I've been using it for a few years now combined with SQLAlchemy for my database layer and I've found it perfect for development of all my web sites.
It is easily good enough for production sites too.
The one downside I've found is slight complications getting it deployed on shared hosting but as long as you have shell access to your host, you should be fine.
You may try to install and customize Joomla (http://www.joomla.org/) It's full of stuff, easy to use and easy to customize also.
Everybody reaches for a framework, but, assuming this is running on Apache, why not just server side includes, and, since you have Python experience, Python CGI scripts that emit JSON for use in the UI by Javascript. By going with CGI/SSI you defer your decisions about framework and/or templating system until later, when you have more experience under your belt, but you should be able to get a reasonable amount of re-use of whatever Python code you write.
I'll cast my vote for Drupal (http://www.drupal.org)
I think LOVDbyLess might do exactly what you want. If all you need is basic blog and photo upload and a simple SNS, then check out this Ruby-on-Rails open-source thing. It's been evolving with new features and is pretty easy to set up.