A three-hour seminar I co-authored with Jamel Eddine Jridi for IFT3225 – Technologie de l’Internet, in which we build a small blog with Flask, Jinja templates and an SQLite database.

Type

Seminar

Duration

3h - 1 bloc/sitting

Co-author

Jamel Eddine Jridi

Course

IFT3225 – Technologie de l’Internet

Technologies

Python, Flask, Jinja, Werkzeug, SQLite

Materials

2 slide decks (PDF): theory and code

Language

French

View the seminar on GitHub

What the seminar covers

The theory part explains where Flask comes from (it began as a thin layer over Werkzeug and Jinja), how this Python web framework works, why its built-in routing is an asset for such a light library, which important web tasks require extensions, and how it compares with its competitors.

Building the blog

The code part assembles a complete blog application step by step:

• an MVC structure, keeping in mind that Flask does not impose one
• the base application: imports, the Flask instance, configuration and routes that handle GET and POST
• Jinja templates that extend a shared layout and display flashed messages
• a data layer written in plain SQL on SQLite and handled at each CRUD step, with a note on why an ORM is usually preferable
• a simple project structure, then the final run with flask run

Front-end options

Views are written in classic HTML and CSS with Jinja, but the slides also show that the same Python back end can serve a React front end instead.

View the seminar on GitHub