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)

MongoDB in Flask

MongoDB is far and away the most popular NoSQL database. MongoDB is also the best-supported NoSQL database for Flask and Python in general. Therefore, our examples will focus on MongoDB.

MongoDB is a document storage NoSQL database. Documents are stored in collections, which allow the grouping of similar documents, but no similarities between documents are necessary to store a document in a collection. Documents are defined in a JSON superset named BSON (short for Binary JSON). BSON allows JSON to be stored in binary format rather than in string format, saving a lot of space. BSON also distinguishes between several different ways of storing numbers, such as 32-bit integers and doubles.

To understand the basics of MongoDB, we will use Flask-MongoEngine to cover the same functionality of Flask-SQLAlchemy in the previous chapters. Remember that these are just examples...