Flask

So lately I have been bouncing around various Python web frameworks and each have their pros and cons. Some are applicable to the environment that you are working on eg: Tipfy, webapp2 were developed to be used on AppEngine. You can use these on other platforms, and there is documentation on how to do that.

For the last couple of years I have been using Django, which is a very nice framework and it has all the bells and whistles. I’m very comfortable with it and can get things done quickly on it. But since I started playing with the AppEngine platform and developing a web application that used Django on AppEngine, I felt it was bloated and slow to start up. Ok granted Django, is not the best framework to use on AppEngine, although there is now django-nosql project in the works. So that got me looking at other Python web frameworks which has taken me from tipfy to webapp2. Both excellent frameworks that work well on AppEngine.

Now working on other platforms I am wondering about the other frameworks I have come across and trying them out. Flask being the latest. I like the documentation, which is extensive and am busy working through the nuances of the framework.

It is takes no effort to get coding simple applications. Busy looking at the effort to work on larger applications. There is documentation about this and for me the best way to work it out is to try it out. So once I have finished going through the documentation I’ll develop a web application using Flask.

The beauty of Flask for me, is that it is very lightweight but has the basic parts one needs. It is based on http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/ which is a WSGI utility library. It also makes use of Jinja2 by default for templating purposes, which suits me perfectly.