Ron DuPlain - Instant Flask web development : tap into Flask to build a complete application in a style that you control

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Flask started as a project to show you how you can build your own framework on existing Python toolkits. Actually, Flask started as an April Fool's joke in 2010. Several microframeworks had been appearing in the Python community, offering their own set of interfaces to build web services and applications entirely in one .py file. Having built Werkzeug (a web programming toolkit) and Jinja (a templating engine), Armin Ronacher zipped these two projects, put the zip file base64-encoded into a .py file, added a few small functions, and called it the Denied microframework.

The April 1st marketing site for Denied included a working "Hello World" application in a few lines of code, a spoof screencast, some bogus testimonials, zero documentation, and a few hints that you should not trust everything you read on the Internet. Denied was a critique on how an open source project can go wrongmostly through missing documentation and design flaws that can cause serious issues in production programs.

This was Flask's beginning, the microframework with good intentions. Flask aimed to provide a good developer experience through clear, simple interfaces packaged with useful documentation, a thorough test suite, and careful thought to production issues and backward/forward-compatibility across releases. Flask demonstrated how to build a thin layer on top of Werkzeug and Jinja. Then Flask became popular on its own, developed a community, and now several Flask-built applications are in production, small and large.

As a contributor to the Flask project, I observed that most new users ask questions of the form, "what is the Flask way to do X?" Most of the time, the question is better stated as, "what is the Python way to do X?" Flask does not have many options about how you use it, which makes it a great tool to start simply and grow carefully without fighting the options, deeply embedded in the framework as your project gets large.

That said, when you are getting started with Flask, you will wonder how a representative application looks. This book will show you just that. I have condensed my own experience with Flask into a small but complete application which we will build bottom-up one piece at a time. Along the way, I will provide pointers as you make considerations in your own projects. If, by the end of this book, you want more, take a look at the scheduler application that we built, identify areas where you would like to design your own improvements, and use these areas for projects to exercise your web development skills.