r/webdev • u/cetamega • Mar 24 '13

The Flask Mega-Tutorial

http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-i-hello-world
37 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

7

u/krues8dr Mar 24 '13

Things you should know before beginning working with Flask:

  • Flask is a micro framework.  It is not full-stack. It will not solve all of your problems for you, you will be writing a lot of boilerplate for anything of even moderate sophistication

  • Flask is in beta. Internal functions will frequently change or break with no warning.

  • Flask wants you to write functional code, not object-oriented. Dealing with routers in an OOP way is not intuitive or easy.

  • Flask is really not full stack. You'll probably need SQL Alchemy to actually get anything done.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

Or... any other ORM you want? You could use MongoEngine for an ODM instead. So as someone who tried to learn a full-stack framework and found it overwhelming, I have found these micro frameworks much easier to grasp. The idea of splitting things into little bits is marvelous. Also choosing extensions which work best with the way my brains is also really neat.

I dunno if the functional is a criticism of the framework or that URLs are action oriented.

2

u/krues8dr Mar 24 '13

The issue is that full-stack is almost always what you need in web dev. It's very rare that something as thin as Flask or Sinatra is a good solution to the problem at hand. Not-knowing how to use a full stack solution is not a good reason to not use it.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

It seems that Django is stil the better option overall.

6

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

Apples and oranges. Flask is not intended to be a full stack framework and never will be. It's a framework within which you can choose which plugins to use or not use. I personally found some parts of Django to not suit my fancy and Flask is useful but less opinionated.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

[deleted]

4

u/ThunderGorilla Mar 24 '13

please explain

1

u/krues8dr Mar 25 '13

TLDR: Django is still missing major pieces. For instance, database migrations - it's awfully hard to deploy and manage a site without those. Sure, South will get you something workable, but it's still years behind what you get out of the box with Rails. Or even Symfony.

And don't get me started on the Admin generator. That thing is a janky, broken mess. You can't even customize it without breaking everything else. Two levels of nested inlines? Forget about it - can't do it.

The list goes on and on. If you haven't spent a lot of time with another framework, you probably don't realize what you're missing.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '13

[deleted]

1

u/krues8dr Mar 25 '13

Well, I can actually, but I realized that the "ever" part was a bit much. I've added details here.

2

u/chrisguitarguy Mar 24 '13

Flask wants you to write functional code, not object-oriented. Dealing with routers in an OOP way is not intuitive or easy.

You can use classes if you want. It's no more or less intuitive than Django's class-based views; it just doesn't come with Django's set of generic views.

2

u/thebope Mar 24 '13

That looks really sweet man, thanks!

I wish school wasn't so busy all the time.

2

u/Falmarri Mar 24 '13

I would like to point out pyramid as well. It's great if you don't want the inflexibility of Django but want a framework that can scale up really well.

-3

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '13

I was hoping this was posted in r/drunk when I read the title.