Disclaimer

There are a number of issues with this tutorial:

• It uses Python 2.7
• There is no real documentation
• It is incomplete: the claims below are not borne out by the code

I am currently working on a book that uses Flask only for a back-end API, replaces the Redis data store with Postgres, and uses React for the client. Rather than use a low-level HTTP or XML request or resort to the jQuery, it uses Axios instead.

Original Readme

I think you just need python 2.7+ and flask, which in turn requires some things.

pip install flask

This repo is a tutorial for learning Flask, a web micro-framework for Python. It is intended for use on Cloud 9 (c9.io) a cloud-based IDE. The intended audience is High School students who have taken an AP programming course or equivalent and have familiarity with Python.

The tutorial will cover:

• Setting up and running Flask
• Creating views to handle urls
• Using templates for html rendering
• Storing data in either a json local file or on a local redis server
• Using bootstrap.js to format a web page
• Handling forms
• Using javascript for asynchronous updates
• Creating a scalable deployment

Part 1 is focused on server side programming (L1 -- L13)

Chapter 1 is on handling routes & providing views using Flask (L1-3)

• Add one or two links between pages and use url_for and redirect

Chapter 2 is on using templates (L4-7)

Chapter 3 is on data persistance using JSON and Redis (L8-10)

Chapter 4 is about handling forms (L11-12)

Chapter 5 is about sessions and logins (L13)

Intermission is about refactoring (L14) (Deployment prelude?)

• Breaking up your server files into static, templates, etc.

Part 2 is focused on client side programming (L15 -- ?)

Chapter 6 is about connecting the pages by adding navigation bars, etc.

• What about changing the images to be on the server rather than fetched?
• Or instead add a new image and make it local.

Chapter 7 is client side presentation with Bootstrap.js (ch ? through ?)

Chapter 8 is client side programming with javascript (ch ? through ?)

• Linking stuff with onclick and onhover & changing web page content
• Sending for more information from the server & using it

Part 2.5 is about the model?

Chapter ? creates a Redis interface class that handles all of the database interactions. Make it handle server-down issues more gracefully. Maybe even allow a way to checkpoint & reload the animal data, the user data, and the web stats (separately). The files should be editable.

Part 3 is focused on systems engineering

Chapter 8 is deployment (ch ? through ?)

• Unit Testing & Load Testing & User Testing & A/B Testing
• Security concerns
• Monitoring performance & scalability
• Monetizing the results
• Connecting to other services (like google maps mash-ups)
• Running it from your home
• Migrating to AWS
• Making your code modular
• User logging module to add logging of interactions
• Use flask-classy to turn everything into classes?
• Use frozen-flask to create static pages for a non-form site
• Use flask-user (built on flask-login) to manage user info & sessions

Chapter 9 is a larger reference example in some detail

There organization is as follows:

1. Three top level Parts: server-side, client-side, and systems
2. Each Part is made up of about 4 to 5 Chapters
3. Each Chapter is made up of two to four core Lessons plus one or two Deep Lessons

• Issues

1. From ex2, Hello World! in hello() has a newline which is not an html newline. Maybe we should only return html?
2. There's no experience using url_for and redirect early on either in the python or the templates.
3. The images should be local so that results do not depend on other sites being up and active.