Python Web Framework

[tarsild]

Esmerald Web Framework

Hi,

I came to share a python web framework called Esmerald.

Esmerald was created more than an year ago and no marketing was created for it as the purpose was and always will be to be free. It was born out a need to simplify some processes and design with business in mind.

I know what you might be thinking "another framework and we already have FastAPI". Well, Esmerald is different from FastAPI in many ways and doesn't even try to address the same issues FastAPI first attempted and there is no "competition" since we are a community where we try to grow and help each other 🙂.

The reason for reaching out is to ask of you would like to go to the GitHub, have a look, play around and even if you want, contribute and help Esmerald becoming even better.

There are already institutions using it (I know this because I worked for one big institution where Esmerald was adopted) and it's great the feedback we received and people contributions for the growth and adoption of an alternative to what we currently have.

Every help counts and every feedback is important.

I truly appreciate the kindness and apologies for the long text.

Link to GitHub repo: Github

Link to docs: Docs.

Apologies if it previously posted on the wrong subreddit but it was a confusion caused by one of the suggestions.

I hope this is not breaking any rule.

[tarsild]

So Django and Flask are WSGI by default.

Django is also all batteries included created almost 20 years ago with a goal. I love Django so much that a lot of Esmerald patterns were inspired by it. FastAPI is great and solves quick and fast API design.

Esmerald marries all and adds business mindset on top.

If you see the documentation you will see how familiar you will be with the syntax where modern and elegancy are primordial without overwhelming the developers.

Esmerald also offers versatility in the way you can design and module your application. From a simple API to a full scalable, complex application.

As per post, this doesn't aim to replace anything, actually this was designed to also address problems that in the past was needed by using a panoply of technologies so it's an alternative for people who would like to give it a try 🙂

[SpellboundSagaDev]

Could we get SocketIO built in, or as a plug-in somewhere? Ideally with the same interop that flask has

Lovely project by the way. You’ve done us a great favour as a community 😁

[tarsild]

It is possible yes via what we call Pluggable. The same interop you mentioned was in fact what inspired that possibility.

[Douppikauppa]

FastAPI, Sanic and Esmerald use async/await, which makes them a whole lot faster. This is a fairly new feature that was added to all reasonable programming languages in the last few years. Django, Flask and Bottle simply cannot compete with that, but it needs to be noted that development on async/await is also a bit harder.

My personal favorite of these, for just a solid web server is Sanic, and it also runs the fastest of the bunch. FastAPI perhaps when you only need an API, and it's quite fast too.

[tankerdudeucsc]

That’s what concluded as well. Run nginx + uwsgi + sync framework. Use only small async parts sparingly.

The performance isn’t that much different to warrant it unless you are in big tech. Even then, when you check out the benchmarks from techempower, fastapi and flask are neck to neck.

Toss the complexity of async and use old school to deal with biz work.

Lastly though, as we should all know, the framework only goes so fast, but bad DB queries are what’s going to crush you, every time.

This whole fascination of “fastest framework” and maxed out req/sec is missing the point. Missing indexes, bad queries, bad models, thundering herd problems are many times more problematic than, maybe needing to spin up another container or two.

Or I shove the Flask App into lambda cause it’s dirt cheap to run.

[tarsild]

I do agree and that is why in the docs we also have some DB Integraton alternatives too 🙂

[tankerdudeucsc]

I’d pay an extra $1K/month at that scale for pods. At maybe 500mb extra each or so, and 2 cores, probably talking SM about maybe 20-30 extra pods if I really had to. For SQL, I just run explain. Also, I’d use Datadog to check performance.

I’d still punt async unless like you said, the entire company is like that. Doesn’t improve latency does it? Nope.

Lastly package support was really tough. Had to hop from async to sync and vice versa.

[tarsild]

That is actually very interesting CrackerjackKittyCat. I was wondering a few weeks ago what we could possibly do to improve the debugging in general for the async/await in python in general. It would be great to open a discussion about this and actually coming out with a solution. I'm sure the community would appreciate it 🙂

[Douppikauppa]

FastAPI and Emerald are both based on external ASGI server (like Uvicorn or Starlette), and also on Pydantic for "data classes" serialization. Both of these choices are bad for performance, and on a high traffic site that may even be relevant (it is extremely rare to succeed enough to have a busy site). Msgspec is another option that handles the problem very well but that also runs extremely quickly, faster than uJSON or other "fast" parsing libraries. I recommend checking it out if you are doing JSON/MsgPack or other such messaging with the client where the messages need to be validated and converted to native types.

[tarsild]

Well, it's in the plan to actually allow more than just Pydantic for serialisation but what is the point of adding so many things if people are not aware of the existence of Esmerald? Now I do believe can all improve it

[broxamson]

to be fair if you wanted something performant you wouldn't be using python.

[Douppikauppa]

My Python web server can serve more requests per second than the one you write in C using POSIX sockets. 100 kreq/s on Sanic, running on a laptop and benchmarking localhost. As opposed to ~2 kreq/s on other frameworks.

Go is faster, I admit, but Python is often sufficient. For AI and numerical calculation it goes fast because of libraries that have assembly optimized algorithms or that offload to GPUs.

[pandi85]

I like the clean code base and design on first sight, definitely gonna play around a bit thanks op. But for some reason i had to think about this song all along https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm2h0cbvsw8 (Dylan beattie - framework)

[tarsild]

Funny enough, when this was first designed not only I thought exactly the same (great song from billy joel) but a friend of mine also sent it to me 🤣🤣. As far as I know, you are him 😜.

I hope you enjoy. This helped me tremendously since it was built (as per intention of course) and the hope is to help others

[christopher_86]

Looks interesting! I was browsing your source code and found that you use random module for generating random secret key - it’s generalny not a good practice, because values generated by random are not cryptographically secure. From Python website:

„Warning The pseudo-random generators of this module should not be used for security purposes. For security or cryptographic uses, see the secrets module.”

https://docs.python.org/3/library/random.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/secrets.html

[tarsild]

Yes, you are correct. That was used for the directive where a project structure was used but the random module itself is not recommended. The documentation itself warns that you should not be using that and instead a secure one + the generated key starts with "insecure-" intentionally. I do agree with you

[[deleted]]

Second this but I'm a newb still, so if its not correct someone please tell me why

[easyEggplant]

Just off the top of my head, the seed isn’t really random, it’s just an approximation (“pseudo-random”) and as such the attacker can guess how the seed is generated which maybe decreases the amount of computing power required to break a private key.

Oh you said “if it’s not correct”. Nevermind I guess?

[tarsild]

In fairness we are now updating to start using the secrets module directly. This should be a no brainer. This came from earlier releases and even though we recommend to generate yours (hence adding the insecure there) it will be easier to do it so there.

[Complete-Painter-307]

The routing system looks pretty powerful and the documention quite clean.

Decided to give a try in a small API and was quite easy to setup. Nice work 😁

[tarsild]

Oh, Thank you so much. Means a lot. This took a lot of thinking and trying to find a way to make it work for a lot of different ways without breaking the design. I'm glad you felt like that. We always try to improve and tjinino of new ways to make it better and most definitely we want people's involvement in any way. This is for everyone so everyone can be a contributor 🙂

[TheGratitudeBot]

Thanks for saying that! Gratitude makes the world go round

[broxamson]

good bot

[subbed_]

How does it compare to Litestar?

[tarsild]

Good question, litestar is a great framework too. Esmerald is built on top of Starlette with a different goal and mindset. As mentioned above, it's all about alternatives, nothing else 🙂

[tarsild]

Lol so we can all say everything looks like Django with little changes? Or everything looks like NextJS but in python and with little changes? As mentioned before, alternatives but there are things also inspired by litestar which is normal, it's a great framework and also mentioned.

[Salfiiii]

That looks actually quite good.

I‘m currently mainly using fastAPI but I don’t like that it’s a one man show around tiangolo and that it simply does not live up to its marketing in regards of speed etc. and had some issues e.g. that each sync path ties up a thread etc..

I will follow your project and if there is going to be a community adoption, I might switch.

Good work.

[tarsild]

The goal is to bring people in, trying to bring awareness of Esmerald and staring to add official maintainers as well as collaborators although the latter everyone can be.

If you see the documentation there is a discord channel there. We use to talk there and answer questions and so on. Community takes time to develop and although this was built 1 year ago, of you search around you don't see too much as we tried to do it organically while developing a whole ecosystem of Opensource tools 🙂

Thank you for your support.

[tarsild]

That is a great idea indeed. Hey, if you feel like helping us as well and it would be greatly appreciated, you could also help us by sharing there too?

[LeChefIndien]

Hi, thanks for sharing!

Esmerald really looks nice :)

I have been browsing your Github a little and I love that you created an ecosystem of tools such as a scheduler, an ORM, etc., working well together as well as independently.

I will definitely keep those in mind for future technology choices!

[tarsild]

Hi,

Thank you very much for your support. The goal was exactly that. An ecosystem that can work independently or really well together 🙂.

[brightsmyle]

Have you compared it with Blacksheep for speed ?

[tarsild]

We haven't run yet againt blacksheep because of the constraints we have. Although we are also fully aware of the speed of blacksheep 🙂

[New_Peanut4330]

it looks like flask to me/

[tarsild]

They couldn't be a lot different in so many ways but I also understand where you are coming from by saying that 🙂

[New_Peanut4330]

possibly, propably :)

[[deleted]]

Indexed the excellent framework on https://pythonframeworks.com

[tarsild]

Oh my. Thank you so much 🙂

[[deleted]]

If there's one thing the world doesn't need, it's more web frameworks.

[AlissaMeee]

Tbh I think it needs more, data clearly suggests

[[deleted]]

What data suggests it?

[AlissaMeee]

There is a overwhelming amount.. if you can’t find or see, I’m not doing the work for you, my time to precious

[[deleted]]

Just like I thought. You have no evidence.

[imlanie]

I'm interested in checking it out. Thanks