Using ordinary modules for server code?

[hugetim]

Converting Anvil App to Production Level

So its just for organization and legibility then, I get it. It’s odd that you have to break pythonic convention and put the slow imports inside the functions that use them, but its also not conventional to spin up a new python executable every time you call a single function in a script, so I guess it is pretty understandable.

I’ve been toying with using ordinary modules (the kind that could work on both client and server) for code that I know I will only call from server modules. This seems to work as long as you don’t need to decorate the functions with @anvil.server.callable (and The Clean Architecture is telling me to separate the server.callable interface from the code anyhow). The benefit is that Anvil won’t automatically load such a module at every server call–as long as you only import the module inside the server functions using it.

There might be cons in terms of the Anvil IDE’s auto-completion and error tracebacks, though. And the initial load of the client side might also take a bit longer?

[duncan_richards12]

If load time is an issue, I would think the load cost for having extra client modules used only by the server would be less than importing everything every time any server function is called since the browser load is a 1 time cost and since the browser is already running, it ?wouldn’t? be as much of a cost as starting up a server every time.

[p.colbert]

That’s one tradeoff.

Another is that nosy users will be able to see that code, including all comments. They can’t tinker with the Server’s copy of it, of course.

[ianb]

@hugetim

The benefit is that Anvil won’t automatically load such a module at every server call–as long as you only import the module inside the server functions using it.

Since reading this question yesterday was one of the reasons I even made this other post , I am going to plug it here:

@lazy_load_imports decorator (for slow loading imports)

A few times I have read about some imports taking a long time to load, causing every server call to be slower than they need to be. The answer to this I have seen a few times is to move the slow import into the function, breaking python convention, and requiring you to remember exactly what to import for each function. It also requires code duplication if the import is needed on more than one function. So I was inspired by the two forum threads above to write a wrapper function that uses a …