Flask Blueprints

The setting is familiar enough: you're a web developer who has worked with a few programming languages, frameworks and environments, and decided to learn enough Python to make a few toy web applications. Maybe you've already used some Python web frameworks to build an application or two, and want to explore a few of the alternative options that you keep hearing about. This is usually how people come to know about Flask. As a microframework, Flask is built to help you and then get out of your way. Taking a very different approach from most other general-purpose web frameworks, Flask consists of a very small core that handles the processing and normalization of HTTP and the WSGI specif i cation (via Werkzeug) and provides an exceptionally good templating language (via Jinja2). The beauty of Flask lies in its intrinsic extensibility: as it was designed from the start to do very little, it was also designed to be extended very easily. A pleasant consequence of this is that you are not beholden to a particular database abstraction layer, authentication protocol, or caching mechanism. Learning a new framework is not simply about learning the basic functions and objects that are provided to you: it's often as important to learn how the framework can be adapted to help you build the specif i c requirements of your application. This book will demonstrate how to develop a series of web application projects with the Python web microframework, and leverage extensions and external Python libraries/APIs to extend the development of a variety of larger and more complex web applications.