front

Compile a Python function's configuration into a runnable UI (web app, CLI, GUI...) without writing framework glue by hand.

To install: pip install front

Quick example

front itself is not a UI framework: it's the core library concrete front frameworks (e.g. streamlitfront) build on. A minimal in-memory framework, whose "app" is a container rendering each function's docstring:

from collections.abc import Callable
from front import SpecMakerBase, APP_KEY, OBJ_KEY, RENDERING_KEY, ELEMENT_KEY, AppMaker
from front.elements import FrontContainerBase, FrontComponentBase
from front.util import dflt_trans


class App(FrontContainerBase):
    def render(self):
        return {child.name: child() for child in self.children}


class Doc(FrontComponentBase):
    def render(self):
        return self.obj.__doc__


class SpecMaker(SpecMakerBase):
    @property
    def _dflt_convention(self):
        return {
            APP_KEY: {"title": "Untitled"},
            OBJ_KEY: {"trans": dflt_trans},
            RENDERING_KEY: {ELEMENT_KEY: App, Callable: {ELEMENT_KEY: Doc}},
        }


def foo(a, b):
    "Adds a and b."
    return a + b


app_maker = AppMaker(spec_maker_factory=SpecMaker)
app = app_maker.mk_app([foo], config={APP_KEY: {"title": "My App"}})
app.name
# 'My App'
app()
# {'foo': 'Adds a and b.'}

The three-step workflow

SpecMakerBase.mk_spec compiles a short-language configuration (plus a convention of defaults) into a long-language FrontSpec (app_spec, obj_spec, rendering_spec).
ElementTreeMaker.mk_tree builds a composite tree of FrontElementBase elements from the rendering spec: a root container (e.g. FrontContainerBase) with one child per object, built from FrontComponentBase/InputBase/OutputBase subclasses.
AppMaker.mk_app chains the two and returns the root element, callable as the app.

To implement a concrete front framework, subclass SpecMakerBase to supply the concrete element classes as the default convention, and hand it to AppMaker (see the example above, and streamlitfront for a real one).

Crudifying functions

Crudifier/prepare_for_crude_dispatch (in front.crude) let functions with complex arguments (objects that don't fit in a text box or URL) be dispatched through string keys into stores instead — the "CRUD-Execution" pattern. front.dag applies the same crudification to the variable nodes of a meshed DAG.

Docs

Rendered documentation · flat front.md for a single-file view.

For AI agents

front publishes its documentation in forms made for coding agents. If you are one, start here.

The documentation, machine-readable: llms.txt indexes every page; front.md is the whole documentation in one file; every page has a .md twin; objects.inv maps symbols to URLs.

If you are a control freak, the rest of this README is written for you, starting at the top of the page.

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