Building Data-Driven Web Apps with Pyramid and SQLAlchemy Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: What is fullstack development?
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In this course, you're going to learn what's sometimes referred to as full-stack web development. Now, we don't spend that much time
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on the JavaScript side of things but everything else we do spend a fair amount of time on. So, what the heck is full-stack anyway?
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Let's look at all the pieces involved in a typical web application interaction. We have a browser we have our server running out on some cloud hosting
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we have usually a virtual machine or set of virtual machines in the background and our database we're working with. So, a request is going to come in.
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It's going to magically find it's way through the internet to our server. Our server is going to do some processing talk to the database, and so on.
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Where's the full-stack part come in? Well, let's look at the technologies involved here. On the server side there are a bunch of different technologies
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you need to learn. We're going to learn Python. Well, we're going to use Python at least and we'll probably learn little bits of it along the way
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but we're going to focus on using Python along with Pyramid the web framework that we're going to work with. The dynamic HTML templates
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in this case Chameleon. The data access layer SQLAlchemy. In order to deploy and configure our servers
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we're going to need to know a little bit of Linux. Learn that. We're going to use Nginx and uWSGI. These are two cooperating web servers
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that we're going to with to run our Python code in Pyramid. Then we're going to talk to the database. Well, what do you need to know for that?
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Well, maybe this is Postgres or MongoDB. For the course, we're actually going to use SQLite and also a little bit of touch of MongoDB at the end
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but it's easier to switch to something like Postgres. You many need to know the query language to get to that like SQL, or MongoDB's query syntax
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it's like a JSON type thing. We're not going to actually focus much on the query syntax because we're going to use SQLAlchemy
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which lets us sort of abstract that away but you would more or less need to know that in practice.
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You also need to know how to migrate or manage your database over time as it's structure changes.
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Look at all these technologies just on the server side. That's a lot to learn and this whole stack of technologies put together
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is part of what's called full-stack but there's more to it. Over here on the browser side we have HTML and CSS we have to deliver
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to the browser, right? That's ultimately the goal is to show stuff on the screen for the web browser.
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HTML and CSS, we're going to do some work with that. You typically don't want to do the design from scratch
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so you'll pick a front-end framework like Bootstrap. Maybe you're even writing some rich JavaScript apps with say, Vue.js.
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Those are grayed out, because like I said we're not doing much with JavaScript but these are the technologies that you might put
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into play for a full-stack web application. The web can be a little bit daunting. We're going to go through most of these technologies.
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All of the white highlighted ones in this course and you'll have concrete small examples for each one.
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In the end, we'll have it all put together in a full-stack Python-based web app using Pyramid SQLAlchemy, and Bootstrap.