April 2023 Summaries

Fly.io is a platform designed to run fullstack applications across various programming languages. While there are default fullstack frameworks for Ruby, Elixir, PHP, and Python, Node.js appears more complex due to multiple frameworks, package managers, and alternatives like TypeScript, Bun, and Deno. To address this complexity, Fly.io offers community-contributed templates for a few Node frameworks. The key starting point is the package.json file, which outlines dependencies, server start commands, build steps, and development dependencies. A Dockerfile can be built based on these conventions, with variations handled by looking for yarn.lock or pnpm-lock.yaml files. Currently, templates are available for Express, Fastify, Gatsby, Nest, Next, Nuxt, and Remix frameworks, with more in development. The ultimate goal is to replace existing flyctl scanners with this script, enabling seamless integration with Fly.io features like setting secrets, defining volumes, launching databases, and configuring health checks.

Mariusz Felisiak, a Django and Python contributor, explores how to use recent async improvements in Django to run multiple async tasks in an asynchronous view. Since Django 3.0 with the addition of ASGI support (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface), there has been a steady march of improvements that bring Django closer to having a full asynchronous request-response cycle. Now, we're at the point where interesting things are possible for "normal web apps." This article covers how to write an asynchronous view in Django and provides examples of using async ORM operations and calling external APIs. It also discusses deploying Django projects with ASGI servers like Daphne, Hypercorn, and Uvicorn.