Using tools with appropriate ability

As you may have learnt from my previous posts (blog post and fedi posts), I’m writing a client for lotide named Luna. And you might also have seen me saying it’s using Django as framework and my remark on it being unfitting. I am going to elaborate more on this in this post.

Django

Django is a batteries-included web backend framework. It includes:

• web server
• router
• database connector and ORM
• database migration tool
• authentication
• admin tool
• command line framework
• templating engines
• internationalization tools
• form handlers
• email

There is a lot more that can be installed as plugins, and some of these tools can be unplugged from the INSTALLED_APPS in the settings. However, given that the default contains so much, it can be troublesome to get a minimal setup.

Luna

On the other hand, Luna is just a frontend for lotide (a server-side-generated frontend, not to be confused with JavaScript front end), alternative to its official front-end hitide.

I started writing this client (with Django) because:

• This project (lotide) seems interesting and I’d like to work with it.
• I don’t like the default client. Not that the default one is bad.
• Unfortunately, I don’t program in Rust, and am not willing to, so contributing directly to hitide is unlikely.
• This web framework (Django) seems popular, and some experience with if is required for some jobs so /shrug

It doesn’t need database handling, or administration, or emailing. I would definitely have no use for most, if not all of djangoadmin and manage.py commands.

Django is an overkill for Luna. Using a big tool for small task feels very clumsy, with all the tools you won’t use and tools that you have to use.

Alternatives

As I get quickly annoyed with the generated manage.py and the lengthy settings.py getting out of hand, I haven’t worked on the client for quite a while, and am planning to drop development if no one else is taking over.

I have also tried to rewrite it in Go, but it seems internationalization support for Go is quite lacking. So, I backed to a more familiar stack using Quart (with better support for asynchronous programming, though it might be another overkill) and Jinja (which has somewhat matured internationalization support) and renamed it to a less common name (Yue) to avoid name conflict which led me to call Luna’s package lotide_luna. I’m less motivated than before, and also have less time, so this will move much more slowly.