Building data-driven web apps with Pyramid and SQLAlchemy Transcripts
Chapter: Welcome to the course
Lecture: Course topics

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0:00 In case you haven't already
0:01 scanned the table of contents
0:02 to figure out what we're going to cover
0:03 let's really quickly go through
0:05 some of the topics that we're
0:06 going to cover in this course.
0:08 After this introduction section
0:09 we'll briefly cover what you need to set up your machine
0:12 and the tools and editors you need to follow along.
0:15 We're going to introduce the Pyramid web framework
0:17 some of its design principles
0:19 and compare and contrast it with other popular frameworks.
0:22 We'll create our first site.
0:23 Here's where we start writing code in this Chapter 4.
0:26 We're going to create our first site
0:28 and get it up and running in Pyramid.
0:30 We'll look at the various options for HTML templates
0:33 and then, we'll dig deeper into
0:35 the Chameleon template language.
0:36 If you want to use another one, that will be totally fine
0:39 but I make a case for why I think
0:40 this is the best HTML template language out there.
0:44 We'll see that mapping URLs to methods
0:46 in our web app is a central part
0:48 of the MVC framework, the Model-View-Controller framework
0:51 that is in Pyramid and popular among many
0:53 of the Python web frameworks.
0:55 So, we'll focus on taking a URL
0:57 and getting it to run a function
0:58 and getting some kind of response.
1:00 Once we have some basic pages up and running
1:03 we'll look at how we make our pages beautiful.
1:06 We'll bring in Bootstrap.
1:08 Also talk a little bit about some
1:09 other front-end frameworks if you
1:11 want to use something other than Bootstrap
1:13 but we'll look at Bootstrap and how
1:14 to bring that into our web app.
1:16 At this point, we'll have basic
1:18 web app functionality happening
1:20 but it'll all be based on fake, in-memory data.
1:22 Of course, we don't fake, in-memory data.
1:24 We want live, full-stack web apps.
1:26 So, we're going to move down a little bit in that stack
1:28 towards the data access layer.
1:30 We'll talk about SQLAlchemy, how the ORM works
1:33 we'll define classes that map our data
1:35 into our database, and, of course
1:37 run queries to get that data back.
1:39 See, the SQLAlchemy ORM is great
1:41 for creating the initial database structure
1:43 but if it changes, things are going to go crazy.
1:46 Right, our database is going to be out of sync
1:49 with our ORM classes and you'll see that's a full-on crash.
1:52 It's really, really bad.
1:53 It's kind of hard to maintain the stuff.
1:54 Well, Alembic, a database migration framework
1:58 that's peered with SQLAlchemy will come to the rescue.
2:01 We can point Alembic at our SQLAlchemy classes
2:03 and our database, and go, alright.
2:05 We changed these.
2:06 Make the database scripts that are needed
2:08 to do that change, to apply those changes automatically.
2:11 Just make that for us and then we can apply that to like
2:14 say, staging or production as we roll out new versions.
2:16 It's going to be great.
2:18 Once we have our database working
2:19 we'll want to accept user input.
2:21 Probably save it to the database, as well.
2:22 So, we'll talk about HTML forms
2:24 letting users create accounts
2:25 register, enter data, that sort of thing.
2:29 If you're accepting data, you had
2:30 better be validating it, right?
2:32 The internet is a harsh place
2:33 and lots of people try to send invalid data
2:36 either by mistake or maliciously.
2:38 We're going to talk about some really awesome
2:40 design patterns called view models
2:42 for server-side validation and data exchange
2:44 and then, we'll also talk about
2:45 leveraging some HTML5 features
2:48 so we don't have to write any
2:49 JavaScript for client-side validation.
2:51 Testing web apps can be tricky
2:53 because web applications depend upon things like
2:56 databases, and other services
2:57 and the web framework, itself, right?
3:00 Like the request-response model, all that.
3:02 So, we'll see that Pyramid provides
3:04 special infrastructure to make it testable
3:07 so that we can test our web application
3:09 more easily without actually creating the servers
3:12 and doing heavy weight stuff like that.
3:14 Once our app's built, tested, everything's
3:16 working, it's time to ship it, right?
3:19 Put it online, so we're going to
3:21 take our web app and deploy it
3:22 on a brand new Linux server out on the internet
3:25 and we'll have our web app running and live.
3:28 You'll see everything you need to do
3:29 to take a bare Ubuntu image, and get it up
3:32 and running to be our web and database server.
3:35 Finally, we're going to take a look back at
3:38 how we built our application
3:40 how we've structured it so that we have
3:43 a lot of flexibility using various
3:45 design patterns for accessing data
3:47 and validating data, and so on.
3:49 And as an exercise, we're going to convert
3:51 from a relational database to a MongoDB database.
3:55 That's interesting, if you want to
3:56 know about MongoDB, you'll see how to do that
3:58 but it's also interesting just to show
4:00 how flexible these design patterns are
4:02 because we're going to make this conversion
4:04 by just changing a few handful of files
4:07 even though there'll be many, many aspects of our site.
4:10 We'll have that really isolated and focused
4:12 so it's super easy to do whatever
4:14 we want with our data access.
4:16 If you wanted to, say, convert it to calling web services
4:19 and some kind of micro service architecture
4:21 you'd see the techniques we're using here for MongoDB
4:24 would equally apply to that exact same transformation.
4:28 This is what we're going to cover.
4:29 I hope you find it super interesting.
4:31 It's a real world version of what
4:33 you need to build and ship web applications.
4:35 This is almost everything you need to know to go from
4:38 I know a little bit of Python and HTML
4:39 to running these full-stack web apps
4:42 that are things like the training site
4:44 or YouTube, or stuff like that.
4:47 I hope you're excited to learn it.
4:48 I'm definitely excited to share it with you.