Programming Throwdown Episode 113.

Full stack web apps using only Python with Mered Meredith Luff. Take it away, Jason.

Hey, everybody. This is a super, super exciting episode. I can't tell you how many times I've gone

into Google and typed in like Python GUI because as most people know, I do a lot of machine learning. That's my day job.

And I do a lot of it on the side too for fun. And I always want some way to visualize things.

I'm always looking for new ways to do that. And so I'm really excited that we have Meredith here,

who's the founder and CEO of Anvil, and he's going to talk to us about

how Anvil, how you can use Python kind of all the way through the full stack. So thanks. I'm so glad to

have you on the show, Meredith. Thank you very much for having me. Cool. So yeah, there's a lot to

unpack here. Why don't you kind of talk about, you know, what Anvil is, you know, and then we can dive into a lot of the details.

All right. So Anvil is a development environment for building web apps quickly and simply. And it does that by letting you use Python everywhere. So if you jump into the Anvil Editor, you'll get a drag-and-drop UI creator where you can build like component-based UIs.

And then if you double-click a button, now you're editing the Python code that runs in the web browser when you interact with that UI.

And then you can also write some server code and build the database

and add all sorts of external integrations, user authentication, that sort of thing. And then,

you know, click and publish it in a kind of serverless sort of way. So maybe the best way to think

about it is if you think about those old school rapid app dev tools we had like at the

end of the desktop era it's like visual basic and delphi it's like that for the web oh i see so so the

if i remember those tools basically you had this you kind of wizzywig like editor and you could kind of drag and draw buttons you double click, you had this kind of whizzywig like editor, and you could kind of

drag and draw buttons, you double click on them, and it kind of takes you to some partially

auto-generated code? Yeah, exactly that. So what it means is that you can build your user

interface without having to get down and dirty into the HTML and CSS instantly.

You can, it's real programming. This is not one of those no-code things because you're actually writing real code in a real programming language, Python, that runs in the browser.

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