Pythonic spinner

Monday 28 September 2015

Pythonic spinner

Python is fun: it has lovely libraries, is a beauty to type and there are constant surprises — I only recently found out that 3.4 had introduced defaultdict() (collections library), which is phenomenal. With the web there are three options:

  • It can be used on the server-side on the web with the wsgi library or the Danjo framework. Open-shift is a great fremium script hosting service —I have used it here for example.
  • There are also some attempts to make JS parse python in the browser, namely Skupt and Brython, but as they convert the python code into JS code, so they are not amazingly fast (1), but you are showing the world python code.
  • One can transpile python to javascript, which is faster and less buggy, but that is unethical as you'd be serving JS and not a python script —CoffeeScript gets a lot of bad rep for that reason.

Thanks to CSS3 there are a lot of cool spinners out there to mark code that is loading, but none cater for python users. Therefore I made my own spinner icon, specifically: .
The code is hosted in my dropbox: https://github.com/matteoferla/Pyspinner.
<link href="https://rawgit.com/matteoferla/Pyspinner/master/pyspinner.css" rel="stylesheet"></link>
<span class=pyspinner></span>

(1) I tried Brython and liked that it had a mighty comprehensive series of libraries and that it had DOM interactions similar to JQuery. However, I could not get over the fact that, for me at least, changes to DOM elements were not committed until the code finished or crashed —which brought back bad Perl memories. Also the lack of CSS changes and the nightmare of binding functions to events makes me think I might try other options.

No comments:

Post a Comment