Book Image

Mastering Flask Web Development - Second Edition

By : Daniel Gaspar, Jack Stouffer
Book Image

Mastering Flask Web Development - Second Edition

By: Daniel Gaspar, Jack Stouffer

Overview of this book

Flask is a popular Python framework known for its lightweight and modular design. Mastering Flask Web Development will take you on a complete tour of the Flask environment and teach you how to build a production-ready application. You'll begin by learning about the installation of Flask and basic concepts such as MVC and accessing a database using an ORM. You will learn how to structure your application so that it can scale to any size with the help of Flask Blueprints. You'll then learn how to use Jinja2 templates with a high level of expertise. You will also learn how to develop with SQL or NoSQL databases, and how to develop REST APIs and JWT authentication. Next, you'll move on to build role-based access security and authentication using LDAP, OAuth, OpenID, and database. Also learn how to create asynchronous tasks that can scale to any load using Celery and RabbitMQ or Redis. You will also be introduced to a wide range of Flask extensions to leverage technologies such as cache, localization, and debugging. You will learn how to build your own Flask extensions, how to write tests, and how to get test coverage reports. Finally, you will learn how to deploy your application on Heroku and AWS using various technologies, such as Docker, CloudFormation, and Elastic Beanstalk, and will also learn how to develop Jenkins pipelines to build, test, and deploy applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Test-driven development

Now that we have our tests written, how can they be integrated into the development process? Currently, we are using our tests in order to ensure code correctness after we create a feature. But, what if we flipped the order and used tests in order to create correct code from the beginning? This is what test-driven development (TDD) advocates.

TDD follows a simple loop to write the code of a new feature in your application:

In a project that uses TDD, the first thing that you write, before any of the code that controls what you are actually building, is the tests. What this forces the programmers on the project to do is to plan out the project's scope, design, and requirements before writing any code. While designing APIs, it also forces the programmer to design the interface (or contract) of the API from a consumer's perspective, rather than...