It probably wouldn’t be very hard to do something like that with python+flask. Also depends on whether you’re willing to give away gratis hard-drive space on your server—you could save your plans server-side and just retrieve them with cookies ( not that this would be secure but hey ).
You don’t even need to resort to cookies if you have a “save plan” button which serializes your schedule datastructure to Json or XML and provides a temporary download link for it...
Good to know! I don’t know python / flask or how servers work yet, but those sound useful to learn. Any recommendations that might be tailored to this mini-project in particular?
If you end up going down the Python road and your project grows to the point where you feel you would like help, I’d be very interested in contributing to projects of this kind.
I checked out the SO link and a few of the things it linked to (like FileSaverJS) because that seemed most applicable / implementable. It looks like the benefit here is allowing users to immediately save data onto their own devices [is that correct?]
From there, I’m guessing there would be ways to dynamically change what the user sees depending on what’s been downloaded (so we could revisit the schedule even if the tab closes)?
allowing users to immediately save data onto their own devices
Aye. Not that I’d recommend doing it that way but I was basically just curious to see if JS could manage it.
dynamically change what the user sees
If you store information about the schedule they’ve set up in a cookie then yes—but I imagine it would be a lot of info for a cookie. If you intend to let users create or edit a schedule, close the tab and then come back to it later, you’ll probably want to implement that using backend server stuff ( sessions, server-side files, etc. ).
If you already know JavaScript then you may want to check out NodeJS for that rather than python+flask, since you’ll have less to pick up.
I’ll stop here because I’m afraid my thinking out loud about how I might do this could send you chasing wild geese.
It probably wouldn’t be very hard to do something like that with python+flask. Also depends on whether you’re willing to give away gratis hard-drive space on your server—you could save your plans server-side and just retrieve them with cookies ( not that this would be secure but hey ).
You don’t even need to resort to cookies if you have a “save plan” button which serializes your schedule datastructure to Json or XML and provides a temporary download link for it...
Good to know! I don’t know python / flask or how servers work yet, but those sound useful to learn. Any recommendations that might be tailored to this mini-project in particular?
If you have a decent grasp of python then https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-i-hello-world is a very good resource.
This is the book that got me started with python: http://www.diveintopython3.net/
If you end up going down the Python road and your project grows to the point where you feel you would like help, I’d be very interested in contributing to projects of this kind.
Possibly this: http://exploreflask.com/en/latest/static.html
Though I’ve done a bit of googling and it’s apparent that you can serve dynamically generated data directly through javascript without resorting to any back-end stuff: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3665115/create-a-file-in-memory-for-user-to-download-not-through-server
Thanks for the links!
I checked out the SO link and a few of the things it linked to (like FileSaverJS) because that seemed most applicable / implementable. It looks like the benefit here is allowing users to immediately save data onto their own devices [is that correct?]
From there, I’m guessing there would be ways to dynamically change what the user sees depending on what’s been downloaded (so we could revisit the schedule even if the tab closes)?
No problem, good luck with all you do.
Aye. Not that I’d recommend doing it that way but I was basically just curious to see if JS could manage it.
If you store information about the schedule they’ve set up in a cookie then yes—but I imagine it would be a lot of info for a cookie. If you intend to let users create or edit a schedule, close the tab and then come back to it later, you’ll probably want to implement that using backend server stuff ( sessions, server-side files, etc. ).
If you already know JavaScript then you may want to check out NodeJS for that rather than python+flask, since you’ll have less to pick up.
I’ll stop here because I’m afraid my thinking out loud about how I might do this could send you chasing wild geese.
Great, thank you for all the help!