Building Data-Driven Web Apps with Flask and SQLAlchemy Transcripts
Chapter: Introducing the Flask framework
Lecture: What are microframeworks?
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Now it's time to dig into Flask. And let's just think a little bit about choosing a web framework and where Flask might live
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on this spectrum of frameworks. In my mind, there's two ends going on here. On one end, we have what are called microframeworks.
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Microframeworks let you choose exactly the set of libraries and packages you want to use and put them together
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as you like, without the framework imposing how that works. So over here, I would put Flask here what kind of data access layer do you want?
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Well, Flask doesn't care doesn't come with one and it doesn't impose any structure there. Maybe you want to go get SQLAlchemy
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maybe you want to get MongoDBs through MongoEngine or maybe you want to do something entirely different, right? Flask doesn't have an opinion
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or any implementation along those lines. The other end of the spectrum doesn't have a great term like microframeworks.
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But what I'm calling these are building-block frameworks. And these are things like Django. With Django, you can create a website
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create a project and you say Oh, I would like a whole back end where I can just edit the database fields kind of like Excel type of thing.
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That's like a line in the configuration file boom, that's turned on. I want forums or something like this
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I want to plug these big building block pieces together. That's really productive and great if that's what you want.
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But if you don't like the way Django does database access well, sorry, Django does it that way, it's very opinionated.
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Not to say you can't work your way around it or do something different but you're always going against the grain, right?
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So Django helps you by giving you a bunch of steps and opinions, here's how you do it, here's the libraries, go which is sometimes okay and great.
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But if you are the type of person that likes to pick just this library, and just that library and put things together the way you like
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well, microframeworks are probably better for you. Now Flask is not the most micro of the microframeworks.
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We have things like Bottle that live way out there that do very, very little at all. And then we have Pyramid
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which is maybe a little bit towards Django a little bit less microframework but still well in this microframework side of the world.
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So here's how Flask fits together with all of the others. And I think Flask is a great choice. I'm personally a big fan of the microframework style.
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Makes me happy to be over on the left side of this graph generally speaking, but I know Django is also very popular. And speaking of popularity
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Flask and Django are almost identical at the time of this recording with Flask actually growing in popularity relative to Django.
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So I guess the world is about split 50/50 on which side of this graph they want to live on.