Book Image

Flask By Example

By : Gareth Dwyer
Book Image

Flask By Example

By: Gareth Dwyer

Overview of this book

This book will take you on a journey from learning about web development using Flask to building fully functional web applications. In the first major project, we develop a dynamic Headlines application that displays the latest news headlines along with up-to-date currency and weather information. In project two, we build a Crime Map application that is backed by a MySQL database, allowing users to submit information on and the location of crimes in order to plot danger zones and other crime trends within an area. In the final project, we combine Flask with more modern technologies, such as Twitter's Bootstrap and the NoSQL database MongoDB, to create a Waiter Caller application that allows restaurant patrons to easily call a waiter to their table. This pragmatic tutorial will keep you engaged as you learn the crux of Flask by working on challenging real-world applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Flask By Example
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a new Flask application


To begin with, we'll create the skeleton of our new Flask application, which is pretty much the same as our Hello World application. Open headlines.py in your editor and write the following code:

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/")
def get_news():
  return "no news is good news"

if __name__ == '__main__':
  app.run(port=5000, debug=True)

This works exactly as before. You can run it in your terminal with python headlines.py. Open a browser and navigate to localhost:5000 to see the no news is good news string displayed. However, although the old adage may be true, it's bad news that our app does not do anything more useful than this. Let's make it display actual news to our users.