pglet VS Eel

It took me a while to re-find a "Python web app" project that has been posted here and that I vaguely remembered. So I am gonna post it here. It's Pglet https://github.com/pglet/pglet and Flet seems to be its spiritual successor.

Hey, try Pglet - it's very easy to get started and UI looks cool. There is a tutorial how to make a simple To-Do app in Python: https://pglet.io/docs/tutorials/python

Pglet website is made with Docusaurus and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. However, the following solution could be easily adopted for other React-based website frameworks such as Next.js and use a different backend for server-side logic such as Vercel Functions or Deno Deploy.

Pglet – Web UI framework for back end developers\ (25 comments)

I've been developing Pglet framework for 6 months now and I feel it's finally ready for building real apps.

Oh, ASP.NET Web Forms were awesome! I remember it was so easy to onboard new developers: built-in state management between requests, WYSIWYG editor, high-level controls abstracting from HTML. Maybe because I miss ASP.NET so much :) I started working on https://github.com/pglet/pglet to have something like "ASP.NET on steroids" - server-side controls with React UI. However, it's not a HTML passing over WebSockets, but controls state which takes much less traffic with smaller latencies.

I gave up a long time ago attempting to write GUIs in pure python. I've come back to them periodically to see if the landscape has changed, but I'm always disappointed.

My current go-to python GUI solution is to use the Eel library. It renders GUIs in a web-browser like window with HTMl/CSS/JS.It lets you expose your python functions to JavaScript, so data can be easily transferred back and forth between the python and the JavaScript. And since it's just web-dev, it's pretty easy to make things look and feel good enough. Any other web-dev libraries like bootstrap and jquery can be used. It works pretty well for writing GUIs that put data analysis tools in front of my colleagues.

https://github.com/python-eel/Eel

Eel was used to implement the app and communication with the web interface.

I am calling a function from Python using eel and taking the return value. Python functions are asynchronous with JavaScript by nature. This code is combined with other variables to determine if the form can continue. allFilled() is called everytime the form field changes.

In the past, I've used QT4 and QT Designer. It was okay. It was a small mountain to climb for myself then - but certainly doable. However, there was a lot of generated code that wasn't the most concise thing. Today, I discovered Eel. Since I used QT4 in the past, I've done some web dev. Certainly, not proficient there. But Eel wasn't as big of a hurdle. In fact, it took me a fraction of the time because it is much like creating a basic website. Where there's an abundance of tutorials and tips out there for everything imaginable. Instead of downloading and adding a font, clicking through a bunch of dialogs. I just linked a Google font and updated the CSS. Stuff like that.

If you don't want a web-app, you can still use JS for GUI, using something like python-eel https://github.com/python-eel/Eel