Flask

I’ve been studying Phyton for almost a year, now, and I love everything about it: the readability, the flexibility, and the PEP8 guidelines—they’ll make me a better programmer.

I’m interested in Python mostly as a vehicle to program in ROS (the next thing I’ll be teaching myself). I’m also curious about computer vision.

My experience, though, is in web. One of my mentors recommended I look into web frameworks add a way to deploy some protects online.

Flask or Django

There are quite a few web frameworks for Python out there but I quickly narrowed down my choices to two: Flask and Django.

They are both well documented and adopted, but after a bit of reading I decided to give Flask a shot. Django is really solid but it’s also more opinionated and comes preloaded with too much stuff for what I need right now.

Flask on the other end is fairly light (calling itself a microframework) while offering a generous registry of extensions.

Learning Flask

Again: it is well documented and adopted. It’s fairly easy to find resources to learn how to use it.

I’ve loved taking Lalith Polepeddi‘s Lynda course titled: Learning Flask.

I’m also going through Miguel Grinberg’s Flask Mega-Tutorial and it’s really well done.

Bonus

The Lynda course covers deploying the app to Heroku, which is a great way to get started on the awesome Heroku CLI. Remember that Heroku offers a great free plan to experiment with dynos.

Flask relies on a Python template engine called Jinja2, and it’s really fun to use—template inheritance in particular. For example:

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block title %}Index{% endblock %}
{% block head %}
    {{ super() }}
    <style type="text/css">
        .important { color: #336699; }
    </style>
{% endblock %}
{% block content %}
    <h1>Index</h1>
    <p class="important">
      Welcome to my awesome homepage.
    </p>
{% endblock %}

The {% extends "base.html" %} syntax takes a baseline template and inserts custom blocks inside of it. Jinja2 also supports control structures and one can loop inside a template, for example.

Always more to learn

The tutorials build apps relying on PostgresQL, open source object-relational database system. It’s a great opportunity for me to learn the SQL access methods and I’m looking forward to learning how to add a database to a dyno in Heroku. I’m excited to think of the possibilities…