Web Development with Flask and Python
I haven’t done anything that could properly be called web development since about 2002, when I took a college course in it. There have been a few developments in the field since then, and I’m a little rusty.
I chose Flask, because I like python and because Django seems like overkill for what I’m doing. There are literally dozens of frameworks out there, and I imagine some people know and care about the differences between them. If I had comments enabled, they’d be yelling at me to switch to Django right now. Hence, no comments.
Installing Flask is easy on Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-flask
I copied the Flask “hello world” from the Flask page, ran it with
python snowflake.py
which got me the expected result, a web server running on port 5000 with a “Hello World” message.
My plan for this web app is to have users be able to visit some page, and the page will contain an image of a snowflake, generated from the url they used to visit. That’s it, but over on Facebook, my post about generating snowflakes from people’s names made people go just about nuts asking for them. Rather than generate them myself, I figured I’d write a web app.
Flask is a joy to work with. In debug mode, it detects changes to the file that contains the currently running app, and restarts when that file changes. It also presents a traceback and interactive debugger if something goes wrong in your app (it goes without saying that this needs to NEVER reach production, since it’s an interactive python shell on your server).
At this point, I have the core functionality of the app together, and I’m not even done with my beer. I can visit a URL, and a snowflake image gets generated from that URL. Everything else is details, and then deployment.
A couple of downloads later, the image now gets converted to png, and served back to the user as an image in a page. Soon, deployment!
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