SQL, T-Shirts, Embedding and more…

Are you going to PyCon UK in Cardiff next month? We’ll be there, showing people how to build full-stack web apps with nothing but Python, at our stall in the Great Hall. As always, we’ll give out a nifty Anvil T-shirt to anyone who builds an app with Anvil during the conference.

This time around, we used SciPy and Anvil to work out how many T-shirts we need to bring. The answer involved a little stats, a little SciPy, and a whole lot of Python, so I wrote it up as a blog post. Check it out: How Many T-shirts Do I Need for a Developer Conference?

Meanwhile, here’s what’s new in Anvil this month:

1. Get the Best out of Material Design

We’ve published a guide to making your apps look their best with Anvil’s Material Design theme. Change your colour palette, build a sidebar menu, or use custom CSS to control your app’s appearance.

Click here to read the guide

2. Direct SQL access to data tables

Anvil’s internal database is powered by Postgres. Now, if you’re a Dedicated Server user, you can connect directly to it and write queries with SQL! Look for the check-box in the Data Table configuration:

3. Embed your Anvil apps in other websites

We’ve made it easier to embed Anvil apps in other websites. When you open the Publish dialog, you now get a checkbox for “Embed this app in” a web page". Enable it, then copy and paste the HTML snippet into any website to include your Anvil app there!

4. The Free Plan is bigger and better!

It’s great to see what hobby users, prototypers, educators and students have been doing with Anvil. We’ve made Anvil even better for them, by enabling more of our advanced features - like the Uplink and the Users service - on the Free plan. Check it out!

(You’ll still need to upgrade for a full Python server environment, to remove the Anvil banners, or to use your own domain name, though.)

5. Other Updates

As always, we’re making Anvil better all the time. Here are a few things you might have missed:

  • We’ve added a few more example apps to our examples page - including the time we built prototypes of two Silicon Valley startups in a couple of hours each!

  • We’ve made it easier to lay things out in our drag-and-drop designer. Look out for the dotted lines to see which container you’re dropping a container in.

  • If you’re storing encrypted App Secrets in your Anvil app, you can now enter longer, multi-line strings. (Great for private SSH keys!)

  • The modules for our Google and Facebook integrations have moved - they’re now anvil.google and anvil.facebook. Don’t worry, your existing apps still work!

  • Your apps now load a little faster :)

Happy coding!