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