Autumn Framework - Build front-end in the back-end

What are we?

Autumn framework, a framework built to make front-end work as close as possible to back-end work. Our goal is not to provide a server or back-end, but a tool that makes front-end look like back-end. By making an ORM(Object Relational Mapping), we add an object-oriented way to write HTML documents and CSS styles directly from Python.

Why us?

You are not limited to us, there are Jinja2 and so many other libraries. What makes us unique is making you to look at a Python class rather than a div tag.

While our top priority is Developer Experience (DX), type safety, and over-the-top composition, we might as well note the speed and caching mechanisms:

Tests proven Autumn's speed is less than one millisecond(For simple pages), and removing the IO for visible test outputs increases the speed even more, pushing it towards/below 0.5ms. Speed is improved even further by caching tags/styles, making the load time for a static HTML page identical to a simple O(1) for a simple list lookup.

Installing

The project is available in PyPI as autumn-core, so installing it is as simple as a:

cd /path/to/new/project
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install autumn-core # or .venv/Scripts/pip for windows

Then you can start using Autumn in any way you would like.

How?

The process is straight. But there are important things to consider:

• Thread safety: While we try our best to promise thread safety, such as features like before_build, we cannot lock every read/write for classes defined outside of Autumn's hands. All classes that do not inherit from AbstractBase are NOT made to be automatically thread-safe. Your classes are up to you, so, for reads/writes, it's best to access self._lock.
• Dynamicity: When elements are dynamic, their dynamic must be set to True. However, if any of the tags owned are dynamic, the parent will be inferred as dynamic, therefore no need to set dynamic to True. All dynamic tags completely bypass caching.
• Building: At before_build, you can either just change the class and let the process continue, or return a string. The returned string is the final output of the build.

here is an example with HTML, another with CSS.

HTML

Instead of writing:

<div id="hello-world">Hello World!</div>

You write:

from Autumn import new

Base = new()

tag = Base.tag

class MyDiv(tag.Tag):
    def __init__(self):
        self.name = "div"
        self.closable = True
        self.identifier = "hello-world"
        self.tags = ["Hello World!"]
        # How we recommend it.
        # However, you can place spaces, tabs, and newlines, but be aware that they will be
        # Replaced with -.
        
        super().__init__()

While this seems like writing too much, it's core benefit will be seen when writing dynamic tags or when you don't know about HTML too much. Let's see an example for a dynamic tag.

import time
from Autumn import new

Base = new()


class MyText(Base.tag.Tag):
    def __init__(self, classes: list[str]):
        self.name = "p"
        self.closable = True
        self.classes = classes
        self.dynamic = True
        
        super().__init__()

    def before_build(self, **_kwargs): # Recommended.
        self.tags.append(time.time())

This will produce a well behaving Paragraph with dynamic elements.

CSS

Well, this is straight forward.

div.any-div#my-div-used-for-footer {color: #000000;}

will simply turn into:

from typing import Any
from Autumn import new

Base = new()

class MyStyle(Base.style.Style):
    
    def __init__(self):
        self.name = Base.name.Name("div", Base.name.Identifier("my-div-used-for-footer"),
                                   [Base.name.Class("any-div")])
        self.styles = [
            "color: #000000;"
        ]
        
        super().__init__()

This will also become valuable when writing dynamic CSS or when you simply don't know CSS. Let's see an example for that too.

from typing import Any
from Autumn import new

Base = new()

class MyStyle(Base.style.Style):
    
    def __init__(self):
        self.name = Base.name.Name("div", Base.name.Identifier("my-div-used-for-footer"),
                                   [Base.name.Class("any-div")])
        self.styles = [
            "color: #000000;"
        ]
        
        self.dynamic = True
        
        super().__init__()

    def before_build(self, **kwargs):
        if "style" in kwargs:
            self.styles.append(kwargs["style"])
    

A note on Thread safety

Thread safety is one of the most important parts to remember, every public and private method is automatically thread-safe if it inherits from AbstractBase. Well, excluding getattribute, setattr, every public/private method is thread-safe, unless it's a protected method. We do not lock protected methods, as they are (mostly, by convenience) used by the public/private methods themselves.

When to prefer Autumn

As said, there are many other great options, but Autumn's unique philosophy and traits are one of the reasons people use Autumn instead of Jinja2 or React.

Throughout the last weeks, we've made extensions to the core, such as support for varies of CSS properties, and support for most HTML tags. Even then, some goals might be truly out of hand or might require extreme metaprogramming, such as support for JS6.

Our future goals

Our future goals (currently) can be listed as:

1. Out of the box experience.
2. A stable and mature ecosystem.
3. Complete support for HTML/CSS, etc...