The “impossibly small” Microdot web framework

by pykello • 11 months ago

225 58 11 months ago

emil-lp• 11 months ago

Microdot is apparently a Python web framework that runs on both CPython and MicroPython.

It is a single 765-line file with routing, JSON handling, cookies, streaming, and TLS. Created to provide a web server for IoT devices.

homarp• 11 months ago

https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/microdot with MIT license

enkrs• 11 months ago

It’s great on esp32 with MicroPython. Even has support for server sent events (SSE). Paired with htmx, SSE gives some fun intetactive web experience for iot devices - instant GPIO status indicators etc. Loved tinkering with it. The source code is very readable too.

cout• 11 months ago

Sounds like this framework is comparable in size to the original Rails, which clocked in at under 1000 lines of code (microdot is 765 lines per the article).

I don't know if the original Rails would have run on mruby though (if it had existed at the time), and Rails certainly did a lot of things the author of microdot would have considered "dark magic".

miguelgrinberg9• 11 months ago

Always a nice surprise to find my stuff on the front page. If you have any questions about Microdot, I'm here to answer them!

xrd3• 11 months ago

I really love this post. The author did a great job with their writeup, and that probably came from a clear presentation.

I'm fascinated by your approach where you used your own temperature and humidity monitors. Apologies if this is in the links in the article, but I wondered how you controlled your heating unit. The reason I ask is that I have a nest device talking to my AC unit, which means I'm locked into the Google ecosystem. It works well, but it doesn't connect to the Home Assistant system for everything else in the house. I would like to remove the Nest dependency, or at least have multiple ways I could start optimizing the power utilization of my AC unit.

miguelgrinberg9• 11 months ago

Thanks. The smart heating device in question is one that is fairly popular in Ireland, but I believe it isn't sold elsewhere. The brand is Climote (https://www.climote.ie/).

As part of the service, this controller gives you the option to send commands through an app, or by sending SMS (the device comes with a SIM card and gets its own mobile number). The commands would allow you to ask if the heating is running or not, to turn the heating on or off, and so on.

I first implemented the SMS interface with Twilio, but then found that the number of texts you can send to the device is capped. I don't remember what was the monthly allowance, but I reached it in a few days after querying the device every 15 minutes or so 24/7.

I then found a project on GitHub with the reverse-engineered API that the phone app used to send commands. So I then reimplemented the command logic using this API to be able to talk to the controller without limitations.

I'm not familiar with the Nest devices, but I'd suggest you do a search on GitHub to see if someone figured how to reverse-engineer its API.

HexDecOctBin• 11 months ago

Why did you want the server to use Python? It seems simple enough to be easily be done in bare C.

miguelgrinberg9• 11 months ago

I wanted to use MicroPython for this. I have nothing against C, it is a language that I actually know and use for other projects, but I wanted the challenge to try to build something similar to Flask or FastAPI that could run well on small devices.

Tepix2• 11 months ago

I looked at your benchmark article. I would like to see how many requests per second these SoCs with your server can manage on a simple task (printing the current time) - both with http and https.

Cheers!

miguelgrinberg9• 11 months ago

You are more than welcome to evaluate Microdot on the specific device you are interested in. It is good to keep in mind that people don't run web apps on microcontrollers because they have good performance. Don't expect any miracles.

simpaticoder2• 11 months ago

Yes, I also wanted to comment on the benchmark article[1], because it seems you looked at compute-bound performance rather than rps (requests per second) on simple data. Given that what you made, MicroDot, is a web server, it would make more sense to stress it rather than MicroPython and the SoC, no? That would seem to be more of the purview of the MicroPython and/or SoC devs.

1 - https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/benchmarking-micropytho...

dave333• 11 months ago

I need to measure temperature at multiple points and humidity in my experimental garden shed with a skytherm roof [ http://www.solarmirror.com/fom/fom-serve/cache/30.html ] for passive heating and cooling. Thinking your thermostat code might be 90% of what I need however I don't yet know python. I guess it's easy to understand and modify the code with the help of AI.

MomsAVoxell2• 11 months ago

For my embedded needs, I've relied heavily on TurboLua, which I find really kicks some serious butt:

https://turbo.readthedocs.io

What's great is that signals and fd_sets are supported, so it can really tie the web services and the hardware together nicely. I can easily wire up GPIO, for example.

I haven't dug into Microdot yet - but are there similar mechanisms? I love my Lua projects based on TurboLua, but wouldn't mind seeing some python chops get sharpened, same-wise ...

Edit: I dug in, and I guess the things I want are to be found in the python batteries included anyway .. plus, Microdot is a very small tack-on to microPython, and a pleasure to read ..

miguelgrinberg9• 11 months ago

Right. Microdot just gives you the support to build the web application. This is built on top of the standard asyncio Python library, so you are likely to find good support for most tasks in the ecosystem.

iLoveOncall2• 11 months ago

I'm not sure there's anything "impossible" about how small this is. You don't really need a lot of lines of code to support routes, request and response and nothing else. If anything, 765 lines of code for this is quite a lot.

It also uses libraries for most "extensions" that are available, defeating the purpose and bending the claim that it's 1,700 lines of code including the extensions. Just jinja, one of the dependencies, is 18,000 lines of code. If that counts my Nanodot server which calls flask.app.run() is one line...

_el1s7• 11 months ago

Yeah, it's an over exaggeration to say "impossibly small", it's a pretty normal size for a minimal routing class...

miguelgrinberg9• 11 months ago

To clarify this, note that the extensions are entirely optional, and unlike what you are saying, most do not require any dependencies.

The only two extensions that use dependencies are the one that adds template rendering, and the one that implements secure user sessions.

For templates, you can use Jinja on CPython (where you wouldn't normally have space issues), or the uTemplate library (https://github.com/pfalcon/utemplate) on MicroPython, which is quite small.

For secure sessions, on CPython you have to add PyJWT. On MicroPython you need to add the HMAC and JWT modules from the MicroPython standard library, which are not installed by default. These are also very small.

motorest3• 11 months ago

I'm not sure there's anything "impossible" about how small this is. You don't really need a lot of lines of code to support routes, request and response and nothing else. If anything, 765 lines of code for this is quite a lot.

How do you explain why virtually all frameworks end up requiring an order of magnitude more LoC?

iLoveOncall2• 11 months ago

Because they support a lot more features?

I made a similar "framework" in PHP years back as an experiment and it was a couple hundred lines AT MOST.

Two9A• 11 months ago

I'm reminded of an MVC microframework I put together many years back in PHP: https://github.com/Two9A/BirSaat

Having pulled down a copy just now, the framework itself is 526 lines of PHP, and the sample site (a newsfeed that pulls from the BBC) is perhaps 300 lines in models and controllers. I use the framework to this day to serve out my blog and other small sites, seems to work well without getting in the way.

ou122• 11 months ago

I would love to try this on my ESP32-C3 Super Mini, the small web framework on the small WiFi-capable microcontroller.

stavros2• 11 months ago

All these years later, and I can't get over the fact that Flask began as an April fool's joke, making fun of Bottle and other microframeworks. I guess the joke failed completely.

larodi3• 11 months ago

Joke is Python never made it a front end web language given how easy it was for JS to become a backend and how many of these Python frameworks actually copy off JS, even though Python is older and from a perspective - neater…

stavros2• 11 months ago

This makes no sense. Of course it's easier for a language in a browser to release an executable than a language with an executable to be embedded in a browser. Also, why are we even talking about JS?

NeutralForest• 11 months ago

there are some efforts to compile python to webassembly so let's see who will have the last laugh!

graemep• 11 months ago

It looks a lot like Bottle[1] but with MicroPython support.

[1] https://bottlepy.org/docs/dev/

cryptoboy2283• 11 months ago

https://github.com/miguelgrinberg/microdot

Migrating to Microdot 2

You gotta be kidding...

zem• 11 months ago

it's literally there in the linked readme:

Version 2 of Microdot incorporates feedback received from users of earlier releases, and attempts to improve and correct some design decisions that have proven to be problematic.

For this reason most applications built for earlier versions will need to be updated to work correctly with Microdot 2. The Migration Guide describes the backwards incompatible changes that were made.

giveita• 11 months ago

Just needs a community split some flame wars and a personal drama where someone give just their side of a story on a blog post.

travisgriggs• 11 months ago

Numerous comments on the “impossibly small” bit in the title. It makes me wonder if it was put there as a bit of tongue in cheek, less as a brag. E.g. The “it doesn’t have to be that big” Microdot web framework (which I honestly first thought had something to do with Microdot anti theft devices that they put on cars around me).

Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become. What I think we marvel at is the surprise that sometimes reall can be just that simple. 99% of the people who are using Django/flask/etc don’t really understand how they work under the hood all that well. And so it’s always an “is that all??” moment when we do these “back to the basics” exposé’s where we show that 80% of our needs are covered by something simple and understandable.

chuckadams• 11 months ago

Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become

One other way to look at it is that software is realizing enough of the dreams of reusability that cobbling together scripts at such a high level with only the smallest understanding is finally becoming possible. I'm not going full Pangloss here, development is still a massive clusterfuck in many places and probably always will be by its nature, but the frontiers have pushed waaaaay back since I got started.

naasking• 11 months ago

Reusability is a big part of it, but I also think languages are just a lot more abstract and expressive these days, so fewer lines of code goes further. Empirically, error count is correlated with lines of code, as are hallucinations, so the ideal language for AI coding is the most abstract and expressive language that will get you there.

bdcravens2• 11 months ago

Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become.

There's a reason why, in the late 90s and early 2000s, people were able to jump out of non-technical careers into development using languages like ASP and ColdFusion. There were some shortcomings of the stacks of the day, but functionally, the ability to meet many business cases really hasn't changed since those days.

____tom____• 11 months ago

Not to mention Visual Basic.

bdcravens2• 11 months ago

The last large app I built in CFML (ColdFusion) was based on FW/1, which is a MVC framework in less than 1800 lines (including comments). No external dependencies, but to be fair, the CFML application server bakes in pretty much every dependency that most applications would ever need.

The “impossibly small” Microdot web framework

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