Moving away from NodeJS to a pure python solution for assets

When working with WebApplications it is common to rely on an asset management pipeline to compile scripts, minify css or preprocess images.

Most of the tools available today rely on JavaScript to perform those steps and always forced Python developers to rely on NodeJS to have grunt perform the pipeline tasks, coffee-script to compile their CoffeeScript or lessc to build their css. This causes longer setup times for projects newcomers, complex development environment, working with two package managers and dependencies that you use once a week but still need to be there.

The talk will showcase the DukPy project and focus on how it is possible to build a pure python asset pipeline relying on DukPy to run javascript tools and WebAssets framework to perform the most common tasks that usually Nodejs and tools like Grunt handle for us, greatly reducing the development environment complexity and making its setup as simple as ‘pip install’.

The talk aims at explaining the complexity of managing an asset transformation pipeline through tools like Grunt, especially during deploy, test suites or when a new development environment has to be created, and showcase how this complexity can be dodged by using tools like WebAssets and DukPy.

No more need to keep around two languages, two package management systems and manage your dependencies between them by youself. Just pip install your app and have it working.