Why not!?

Last week I played with Python / Django the natural extension of this was to not do python but to look at using something like Angular and bootstrap, the main reason for this is that just using python / django gives you server side manipulation but why do it all on the server? Ideally the server would generate relavent data and sent the data back to the client for processing, this is how the internet is meant to work after all. Think about simple HTML and CSS, HTML is just a data structure and CSS formats that to make it look pretty for you, now, with modern computers being so powerful, why not have it do the formatting in CSS and also manipulate the data into the right structure.
This way the server just generates a response of say JSON and the client takes this and manipulates it into tables / lists or what ever you need. Another advantage to this approach is all of a sudden you have an ajax driven website with not too much effort which is more efficient on bandwidth, combined with local client side caching of information the user experience should be pretty quick and seamless with or with ut the server, as long a sit pulls the dat to start with it should be okay.

So that covers why Angular, Bootstrap on the other hand is more or less just CSS but quite frankly, I can’t do CSS it never looks right so by using bootstrap I can then programatically set out hierarchy and classes etc while leaving the pretty styling to a theme generator Like this or download one Like this

Tasklist

Okay this is not really fully featured.. You can’t delete stuff from the list it just gets bigger and bigger but was only done to use the combination of applications in the right way and see if it worked, well it works, you can add tasks and it displays them so lets have a look at how pretty it is:

I was only able to achieve this level of prettyness because of bootstrap my past sites have all looked terrible…
The home page just includes some example code from the AngularJS website to prove I managed to get Angular working before butchering it with my typos.

Here’s a picture of it listing the tasks…

So for starters if you’d like to criticise the code the best way of doing that is on GitHub I have no intention of making it any better but if you want to play with Angular, Mongo, Python and Django where python/Django provides a rest api to the DB and Bootsrap/AngularJS provides the front end then this has it all and the set up is pretty straight forward and some brief notes on install / settings in the README. Maybe you could add the ability to edit or delete tasks maybe put a checkbox next to them and track a done status who knows…

Overall…

I quite like Angular and bootstrap as a combo, I think it’s got some real potential to do some powerful stuff and i’m sure people out there are doing some really crazy things with it, hopefully one day that will be me and there will be something worth while coming out of it. I’m not convinced on python/django combination, I’m sure it’s okay but I really need to write some more of it and see how it goes; I’m fairly sure it’ll be better than RoR but that’s not a good framework for ruby anyway.

My next task having played with those is to do something even more whacky, maybe some sort of node.js backend, angular boot strap front end and some sort of queue… The next project I’m working on with a larger team will be pretty good and once we have something up and working it can be shared, the oddest thing will be the “button driven development” approach to development, which is basically top down, where you prototype the interface to look as you want it to and then fill the data with dummy values or hard coded values. Once that’s done write a backend that provides the data. In theory by the time you get to do the technical nitty gritty there’s a very clear idea on what the output should be.