Web Development with Julia and Genie
A hands-on guide to high-performance server-side web development with the Julia programming language
Ivo Balbaert
Adrian Salceanu
BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI
Web Development with Julia and Genie
Copyright © 2022 Packt Publishing
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Foreword
Julia has long been viewed as a tool that was merely for niche scientific computing, and if you wanted to do something beyond crunching numbers, you were out of luck. Ivo Balbaert’s and Adrian Salceanu’s work had to dispel this myth in Web Development with Julia and Genie. I have had the chance to interact with Adrian over the last few years in my role supporting the Julia community, and it has blown me away to see his conviction that Julia developers (and more broadly those in the computing ecosystem) should have access to world-class web development tools in the same language as their computational tools.
Adrian’s deep conviction has given birth to the Genie Framework, a production-ready ecosystem to build web apps natively in Julia. But Adrian’s belief in this space goes beyond his open source contributions. He has also made a big bet with Genie Cloud, the company he co-founded, which is trying to bring this unique mix of computational tools and web expertise to developers through a low code interface.
There are no people better suited to teach the information in this book than this book’s authors. By learning directly from the creator of the framework, you will be able to learn the philosophy of the ecosystem which extends well beyond simple usage examples that you would find in traditional documentation. Adrian also has extensive experience in the Julia ecosystem, which he garnered over many years of maintaining and contributing to various packages and Julia projects.
I am absolutely thrilled to see the Genie Framework’s usage growing and continuing to challenge the narrative that Julia is only for scientific computing. I expect that readers of this book will come away with a tremendous amount of respect for just how impressive the Genie Framework is, and all the hard work it took from Adrian and other contributors. I am so glad to have Adrian and Ivo as part of the Julia community and look forward to seeing the impact of this book and the Genie Framework in the years to come.
Logan Kilpatrick
Julia Project, Lead Developer Community Advocate
Contributors
About the authors
Ivo Balbaert is a lecturer in web programming and databases at CVO Antwerpen, a community college in Belgium. He received a PhD in applied physics from the University of Antwerp in 1986. He worked for 20 years in the software industry as a developer and consultant in several companies, and for 10 years as project manager at the University Hospital of Antwerp. From 2000 onwards, he switched to partly teaching and partly developing software (at KHM Mechelen, CVO Antwerpen). He also wrote an introductory book in Dutch about developing in Ruby and Rails, Programmeren met Ruby en Rails, published by Van Duuren Media. In 2012, he authored a book on the Go programming language, The Way to Go, published by iUniverse. He has written a number of introductory books for new programming languages, notably Dart, Julia, Rust, and Red, all published by Packt.
Adrian Salceanu is the creator and lead maintainer of Genie Framework. He has over two decades of professional work experience as a web developer and software architect, leading agile teams in developing, scaling, and maintaining business critical, data-intensive web applications. Currently, he is the technical founder and CEO of Genie Cloud, a no-code app development platform built with Genie. Adrian is the author of Julia Programming Projects (published by Packt in 2018) and an enthusiastic JuliaLang open-source contributor. He has two master’s degrees, one in Computing, and another in Advanced Computer Science.
About the reviewers
Abhimanyu Aryan is a Julia developer at Genie Framework OSS. Previously, he worked as an ML engineer for an aerospace company for defense services and taught full-stack JavaScript at India’s leading boot camp. He started his career as a Unity developer, working on various augmented reality and virtual reality use cases for Fortune 500 companies.
He also contributed a chapter on Android in Economics of Information Technology: Emerging Trends and Prospects, by Dr. Sunil Phougat and Dr. Pushp Deep Dagar, Savera Publishing House, 2015.
Mattia Nicolò Careddu is a software and data engineer from Milan, Italy, and a Genie contributor. Currently, he is the lead AI engineer and software engineer at nCore, an HR scaleup based in Milan, while also pursuing a bachelor’s degree in statistics and big data. He also founded PlayLife Events, a tech start-up in the event world, based in Italy. He is passionate about technology, AI, and start-ups.