Book Image

Python Programming Blueprints

By : Daniel Furtado, Marcus Pennington
Book Image

Python Programming Blueprints

By: Daniel Furtado, Marcus Pennington

Overview of this book

Python is a very powerful, high-level, object-oriented programming language. It's known for its simplicity and huge community support. Python Programming Blueprints will help you build useful, real-world applications using Python. In this book, we will cover some of the most common tasks that Python developers face on a daily basis, including performance optimization and making web applications more secure. We will familiarize ourselves with the associated software stack and master asynchronous features in Python. We will build a weather application using command-line parsing. We will then move on to create a Spotify remote control where we'll use OAuth and the Spotify Web API. The next project will cover reactive extensions by teaching you how to cast votes on Twitter the Python way. We will also focus on web development by using the famous Django framework to create an online game store. We will then create a web-based messenger using the new Nameko microservice framework. We will cover topics like authenticating users and, storing messages in Redis. By the end of the book, you will have gained hands-on experience in coding with Python.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Contributors
Packt Upsell
Preface
Index

Building the Twitter voting application


Now we have our environment set up and we have seen how to create an app on Twitter and perform three-legged authentication, it is time to get right into building the actual application that will count the Twitter votes.

We start off by creating a model class that will represent a hashtag. Create a file called hashtag.py in the twittervotes/core/twitter directory with the following content:

class Hashtag:
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.total = 0
        self.refresh_url = None

This is a very simple class. We can pass a name as an argument to the initializer; the name is the hashtag without the hash sign (#). In the initializer, we define a few properties: the name, which will be set to the argument that we pass to the initializer, then a property called total that will keep the hashtag usage count for us.

Finally, we set the refresh_url. The refresh_url is going to be used to perform queries to the Twitter API, and...