PyScript • How to run Python in a browser

Key Takeaways

pi script is a new framework that was released just earlier this month which lets you run python code directly in the browser and this is quite a big deal because this is the first time that something like this is widely possible with python my name is jack and in this video i'm going to explain what the pi script framework does i'll show you some examples and then i'm going to talk about what i think this means for the future of python and web development so pyscript was unveiled in may 2022 by anaconda and in case you're not familiar with who they are then they are the company behind one of python's most popular data science platforms so needless to say this team has a solid track record the main selling point of pi script is that it lets you run actual python code directly in the browser and this is quite a new thing before this if you wanted to run a python application on the website it would typically have to be a back-end server that you communicated with either via http endpoints or a socket connection with pi script it's a lot easier you don't even have to install anything if you load up a web page that imports the pi script framework which is just two lines that you need to add to an html file then it's ready to execute python code this means it's now possible to distribute any python project that you create directly in the browser whether that's just a simple automation script a complex data science project or even a game like mario and people will be able to just go to that url and use it without having to install python in fact it should even work on mobile devices environment management is also very much part of the package with pi script that means if you have several files and scripts you wanted to run then pi script would support that this extends to external packages as well in fact a major selling point of pyscript is that it lets you access the entire python ecosystem so that means libraries like scikit-learn pandas and matplotlib are all available for you to use i see this as a particularly strong use case for pyscript because i feel that the existing front-end javascript frameworks today have a bit of a gap in the data science and analytics functionality now at this point you're probably wondering how pi script interacts with the front-end or in other words the html that is being rendered on the page well one way is that pi script exposes some helper classes to your code that lets you find certain html elements by their class or id and then you can change its text or even remove and append the content so if you've used jquery before then this should all sound quite familiar another way is that pi script offers bi-directional communication between python and javascript objects i haven't had a chance to test that functionality out yet myself but i assume that if you're using a framework like react or svelt then pi script will let you interact with it directly from your code now let's take a moment to deep dive how all of this magic actually works behind the scenes the main technology behind pi script is something called webassembly which is sort of a standard for writing code that can be compiled into something that browsers can run this code can be written in any language and as long as you can compile it to a binary in the webassembly format then it can be downloaded and executed directly in the browser webassembly itself is relatively new and has only recently been adopted as a web standard so as of this moment pi script is really on the cutting edge of web technology let's now dive into some examples so that you would have a better practical understanding of how to use pyscript let's start with a blank html file we can add pyscript by just pasting these two lines you don't have to download or install anything pi script will be downloaded by the browser when you open this page you can now use this tag to write python code directly into your html for example print hello world and you'll see it appearing directly in the page now i don't know about you but i actually prefer to write python code in an actual python file so let's do that here and then we can import it into the html like this you can also have things like buttons and input fields which you'll identify with html tags or class names and then you can use those things to interact directly with your python functions you can add new elements to the page and you can even import libraries and plot a graph directly in the browser and that's still just the tip of the iceberg if you visit the official pi script github page then you'll be able to see even more code examples of what it can do now i always find it exciting when new technology like this comes out but is it going to be something revolutionary or is it just a passing fad i think at this point it's too early to tell but here are my first impressions running python in the browser is going to be very handy in use cases where there is a gap in the existing front-end frameworks today so things like data science machine learning and image processing come to mind but i'm sure there's other things as well it will also improve the web development experience for python developers without having to learn javascript and there's a lot of python developers out there as it is one of the most popular programming languages so i'm sure they will be happy about that pi script also opens up the possibility of developing static sites with python logic something that i'm personally excited about and keen to explore that means you can develop a web distributed python app without needing a server or a backend games made with python could also be deployed in a similar manner however it's not all positive stuff there's some drawbacks as well each time the browser loads it needs to download the entire python binary and its libraries that is a major upfront cost and the performance won't be good enough for sites that need to load quickly which is most websites also the python ecosystem is still far behind the javascript ecosystem for web ui for that reason it's hard to see it replace something like react anytime soon but that's okay because i still think it solves a different problem and opens up some very exciting opportunities so that pretty much wraps up my take on pi script if you have any questions or comments about pi script or if you're keen to see a pie script tutorial then please let me know in the comments below otherwise i hope you found this useful and thank you for watching