Flask By Example - Softcover

Gareth Dwyer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1785286935 ISBN 13: 9781785286933

Publisher: Packt Publishing - ebooks Account, 2016

Synopsis

Unleash the full potential of the Flask web framework by creating simple yet powerful web applications

About This Book

• The most up-to-date book on Flask on the market
• Create your own world-class applications and master the art of Flask by unravelling its enigma through this journey
• This step-by-step tutorial is packed with examples on blending different technologies with Flask to get you up and running

Who This Book Is For

Have you looked at PHP and hated the clunky bloated syntax? Or looked at .Net and wished it was more open and flexible? Maybe you've tried your hand at GUI libraries in Python and found them hard to use? If your answer to any one of these questions is a yes, then this is just the book for you.

It is also intended for people who know the basics of Python and want to learn how to use it to build powerful solutions with a web front-end.

What You Will Learn

• Build a web application from the ground up
• Dynamically display data to your viewers based on their requests
• Store user and static data in SQL and NoSQL databases and use this data to power your web application
• Create a good user experience by combining CSS and JavaScript inside HTML templates
• Harness the convenience of freely available APIs, including Open Weather, Open Exchange Rates, and bit.ly
• Extend your application with plugins
• Combine different technologies and use the right tools to solve problems, such as Bootstrap and MongoDB

In Detail

Flask is a simple and minimalistic framework, which makes it easy to learn and beginner-friendly. It is also well-developed and exceptionally well-documented with an advanced plugin system, consisting of all the features of a top-end framework and is extremely powerful to use. It empowers you to harness the flexibility of the web through the elegance of Python without needing to worry about installations and compatibility.

This book will take you on a journey through learning about web development using Python to building fully-functional web applications. We start off with a simple web application that greets visitors with the time-honored tradition of "Hello, World!" In the first major project, we move on to developing a dynamic and useful "headlines" application that displays the latest news headlines along with up-to-date currency and weather information. In project two, we build a dynamic "crime map" that is backed by a SQL database, allowing users to submit information and the location of crimes in order to plot danger-zones and other crime trends within an area. In the final project, we look at how to use Flask with more modern technologies, including Twitter's Bootstrap and the NoSQL database MongoDB. We combine these to create a "restaurant notification" application that allows restaurant patrons to easily call a waiter to their table.

This pragmatic tutorial will keep you engaged as you learn the nitty-gritty of Flask by working on challenging real-world applications.

About this title

About the Author

Gareth Dwyer

Gareth Dwyer first heard the phrase, "behind every no-entry sign there is a door," a couple of decades ago, and he has been looking for a counterexample ever since. He hasn't found one yet. Gareth grew up with his three siblings in Grahamstown, South Africa. There wasn't much there except some highly respected schools and a small university. Gareth had heard that school was an unpleasant and largely pointless experience, so he opted to skip it and go to the university instead. The university door had a no-entry sign on the door because it only accepted people who had gone to school. Gareth ignored the sign. He studied piano for a while but soon, he wondered if there was more to life than sitting in front of a keyboard all day. So he switched from piano to computer science, and it took him a while to realize the irony. He studied philosophy too because it was here that people never told him to stop being so argumentative. Gareth noticed the disparagement that his philosophy and computer science departments felt towards each other, and he found it strange. He soon discovered that he wasn't the first person to see that there was room for some common ground, and he went to Europe to study computational linguistics, where he found other people who liked debating the finer points of language while talking about the three hardest problems of computer science (naming things, and off-by-one errors). In between doodling on blank paper while listening to very knowledgeable people lecture on content that was occasionally fascinating but often soporific, Gareth has gained so-called "industry" experience with companies such as Amazon Web Services in Cape Town and MWR InfoSecurity in Johannesburg. He has several years' experience in writing, and his favorite languages are English and Python. He discovered that writing and writing a book are not fully overlapping experiences, and the former is hardly preparation for the latter. The pages that follow would not have come into existence without the combined efforts of many people.

Edition details

• Publisher: Packt Publishing - ebooks Account
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1785286935
• ISBN 13: 9781785286933
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 194