Daniel Gaspar - Mastering Flask Web Development, Second Edition

Copyright 2018 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Commissioning Editor: Amarab ha Banerjee
Acquisition Editor: Devanshi Doshi
Content Development Editor: Onkar Wani
Technical Editor: Diksha Wakode
Copy Editor: Safis Editing
Project Coordinator: Sheejal Shah
Proofreader: Safis Editing
Indexer: Rekha Nair
Graphics: Alishon Mendonsa
Production Coordinator: Aparna Bhagat

First published: September 2015
Second Edition: October 2018

Production reference: 1301018

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham
B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 9 78-1-78899-540-5

www.packtpub.com

Mapt is an online digital library that gives you full access to over 5,000 books and videos, as well as industry leading tools to help you plan your personal development and advance your career. For more information, please visit our website.

• Spend less time learning and more time coding with practical eBooks and Videos from over 4,000 industry professionals

• Improve your learning with Skill Plans built especially for you

• Get a free eBook or video every month

• Mapt is fully searchable

• Copy and paste, print, and bookmark content

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.packt.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at customercare@packtpub.com for more details.

At www.packt.com , you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters, and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

Daniel Gaspar is a programmer and DevOps engineer with more than 20 years' experience. He has worked in a wide range of sectors, including government and finance. He is currently working at Miniclip (the global leader in digital games). He uses a wide range of tools in his daily work, but Flask caught his attention because of its excellently designed API and simplicity. Daniel is an OSS and Python enthusiast, and has developed a widely used extension/framework named Flask-AppBuilder, used by Airbnb on Superset and AirFlow.

Jack Stouffer is a programmer who has several years of experience in designing web applications. He switched to Flask two years ago for all his projects. He currently works for Apollo America in Auburn Hills, Michigan and writes internal business tools and software using Python, Flask, and JavaScript. Jack is a believer and supporter of open source technology. When he released his Flask examples with the recommended best practices on GitHub, it became one of the most popular Flask repositories on the site. Jack has also worked as a reviewer for Flask Framework Cookbook, Packt.

Damyan Bogoev is based in Bulgaria, where he currently works at Gtmhub as a software engineer. Prior to Gtmhub, Damyan worked at Telerik.

His background is in developing backend server applications and tools for infrastructure automation, management, and monitoring.

Damyan is also technical reviewer for the Web API Development with Flask video course .

If you're interested in becoming an author for Packt, please visit authors.packtpub.com and apply today. We have worked with thousands of developers and tech professionals, just like you, to help them share their insight with the global tech community. You can make a general application, apply for a specific hot topic that we are recruiting an author for, or submit your own idea.

Flask is a microframework with a very well designed API, designed to provide the minimum amount of functionality that is needed to create web applications. It does what it's designed to do really well. Unlike other web frameworks, Flask does not have an entire ecosystem bundled with it, no out-of-the-box features to handle databases, cache, security or form handling.

The goal of this concept is to allow programmers to design their applications or tools any way they want, no structure or design is imposed. However, because Flask community is rather large, you can find a wide range of extensions that will help you leverage Flask with a huge set of technologies. One of the main focuses of this book is to introduce these extensions and find out how they can help to avoid reinventing the wheel. The best part about these extensions is that if you don't need their extra functionalities, you don't need to include them and your app will remain small.

This book will help you structure your application to easily scale up to any size. Using packages and a simple and predictable namespace is paramount to keep maintainability and boost team productivity. This is why the other main focus of this book is how to create a Model View Controller (MVC) architecture with Flask apps.

Modern applications must go beyond well-structured code. Security, dependency isolation, environment configuration, development/production parity and ability to scale on load are factors that must not be neglected. Throughout this book, you will learn how to address these issues, identify possible risks and think ahead of time.