Hey, I just found these videos and they are great! I have a project where i want to use Wolfram as the backend to a microservice and this series covers the subject in more detail than i ever hoped to find. In addition to the subject coverage, I really appreciated watching the debugging and the practical discussions around how you go about building these services, handling errors, reals and such.

I have a question: The APIFunction calls take a simple flat association. I want to send a nested JSON structure that may include lists of objects and could run up to several K bytes. Is there a way to put the input data in the body of the message instead of the URL?

Hi there, I'm Riccardo from WRI. I really like the work you have been doing, those live coding sessions are really nice.

We have been developing a new technology that is allowing you to serve web content from your local machine, we recently published it on GitHub.

https://github.com/WolframResearch/WolframWebEngineForPython

The server is based on some very mature technology and is intended for production, I think it's a perfect fit for the type of applications you are doing (JS frontend with WL backend).

This server is also very useful for developing, because you can develop your APIFunction locally, which allows you to do Print / Echo in order to debug your code and see the output directly in the terminal that is running your server.

Once your APIFunction is coded correctly you can decide how to deploy to production: you can deploy on the Wolfram cloud or use a Wolfram Engine to serve content with your own hardware.

Since I'm the main author of this repo, I would really appreciate a feedback on this technology, so if you have time let us know what you think about it.

Cheers!

Very cool! Thanks for piloting this I just watched the first session, it's extremely beneficial: the WebExecute framework is one of the latest areas of WL that I've started exploring, and I can't believe I went this long without using it.

I also didn't realize I could extract parts of Message objects: passing error messages of failed API calls back to front-end code is a very good use case of why you'd want to have such flexible structures.

Love the tips of trade bit about lack of analogous structures between languages, like the Real value parameters, and adjusting them to fit the JS code.

Just a lot of great stuff in here, and I'm only one session in!

This is an excellent and thorough exploration of Wolfram Language-as-backend design, which is a very powerful paradigm for when a FormFunction frontend doesn't quite cut it. I particularly enjoyed the discussion in session 3 of image sizing and formatting, which is a tricky problem I've dealt with several times and still haven't quite gotten the hang of!

Also, regarding IntegerName, I tried it with a Real and (despite its name) it seems to work:

In[1]:= IntegerName[-0.01]

Out[1]= "minus zero point zero one"