Book Image

Full-Stack Flask and React

By : Adedeji
3.5 (2)
Book Image

Full-Stack Flask and React

3.5 (2)
By: Adedeji

Overview of this book

Developing an interactive, efficient, and fast enterprise web application requires both the right approach and tooling. If you are a web developer looking for a way to tap the power of React’s reusable UI components and the simplicity of Flask for backend development to develop production-ready, scalable web apps in Python, then this book is for you. Starting with an introduction to React, a JavaScript library for building highly interactive and reusable user interfaces, you’ll progress to data modeling for the web using SQLAlchemy and PostgreSQL, and then get to grips with Restful API development. This book will aid you in identifying your app users and managing access to your web application. You’ll also explore modular architectural design for Flask-based web applications and master error-handling techniques. Before you deploy your web app on AWS, this book will show you how to integrate unit testing best practices to ensure code reliability and functionality, making your apps not only efficient and fast but also robust and dependable. By the end of this book, you’ll have acquired deep knowledge of the Flask and React technology stacks, which will help you undertake web application development with confidence.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Frontend Development with React
9
Part 2 – Backend Development with Flask

What is a React component?

A component is the core building block of any React application. Sometimes, you could perceive React as a JavaScript coated with some chocolate. Chocolate is sweet I guess, and so is React. Seriously, building a UI with vanilla JavaScript can be cumbersome. You can struggle with the expensive DOM dilemma!

The thing is, when working with vanilla JavaScript to handle the Document Object Model (DOM), it can get pretty expensive – both in terms of time and effort. Frequent DOM manipulation is high in non-React applications, which ultimately results in the slowness of website elements update.

The virtual DOM solved this problem in React. The DOM only updates what was changed, not the entire DOM tree. However, if you remember how you use functions in plain JavaScript, writing components won’t be a challenge. A function in JavaScript is a code block designed essentially to perform certain tasks.

The same applies to React components, which...