Web Development with Anvil

We’ve been using Anvil for some while now - since they were sponsors at PyCon UK 2017 - and we’ve found it to be a great tool for building web applications.

Since then, we’ve recommended it to several clients and undertaken projects for various organisations that were already using it.

For us, there are compelling reasons both technical and commercial to use Anvil as our go-to tool for web development and to continue to recommend it to others.

What is Anvil?

Anvil is a full-stack platform for building web applications.

It’s a development framework, a hosting and support service, a community of developers, and a tool that scales from solo hobby projects to serious enterprise applications.

Anvil has a drag-and-drop designer for building the user interface, a Python editor for writing the code that powers the application and a deployment system that makes it easy to get your application online.

But let’s also be clear about what Anvil is not - It’s not a low-code or a no-code platform. To use it, you need to write Python code.

Technical Advantages

Web development is difficult. There are many moving parts, many technologies to learn and many ways to get things wrong.

To counter that, Anvil provides a single Python based environment in which to build an application. We don’t need to worry about setting up a server, configuring a database, managing security or any of the other tasks that can distract from building the application itself.

However, Anvil also has ‘Escape Hatches’ - if the Python abstraction is getting in the way, we can drop down to writing our own JavaScript, HTML, CSS or SQL. If the drag-and-drop designer can’t do what we need, we can add UI components with code. We’re not constrained by the Anvil abstraction - it’s there to help make things easy. We can always go around it if we need to.

Commercial Strengths

Anvil is a commercial product. That means that there is a company behind it, providing support, maintaining the platform, and developing new features.

It also means our clients have contracts with Anvil to provide the hosting and support services that are needed to keep their applications running - leaving us free to concentrate on what we do best - building great applications.

We don’t have to be on call for anything unexpected - Anvil’s support team are there to help with any issues that arise. Our clients know they can replace us with another developer if they need to - the application is built in a standard Python environment and the code is theirs to do with as they please.

Conclusion

We’re very happy with Anvil and we’re happy to recommend it to others.

It’s a great tool for building web applications, it’s a great platform for hosting and supporting those applications and it’s a great community to be part of.