Flask for the Masses

Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions. - official flask documentation

To explain this quote a bit further, werkzeug is a python utility library and jinja 2 is a template engine for Python.

Why Flask?

About a year ago, I was looking into another programming language outside of PHP. I’d been an active PHP developer for 10 years, and, to be honest, doing apps only in PHP gets a bit boring. It not having any standardized libraries or frameworks didn’t help either. I found myself spending half of my time reinventing the wheel just for the sake of reinventing something. Thinking I know better than the other PHP developers often leads to spending too much time on the project. This is very common in the PHP world - almost every other developer is building his own framework, and this can lead to certain types of chaos, but let’s not go there now.

I was searching for something new, and at work we had just started to use Django for serious web development. Django, at that point, seemed like too big of a framework and I wanted something small that I could build upon. Then, I stumbled upon Flask, and I’ve been using it for most of my personal development projects since.

In this article, I will cover installing and configuring Flask and running a basic hello world example. Also, I will presume that you have a linux machine installed (or mac) or that you’re running some sort of decent virtual machine, such as Homestead Improved.

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by Mladen Martincevic via SitePoint