- Build and run a Flask application on your computer.
- Extend a Flask application to meet the unique requirements of different projects.
- Web Framework: software that is designed to support the development of web applications. Web frameworks provide built-in tools for generating web servers, turning Python objects into HTML, and more.
- Extension: a package or module that adds functionality to a Flask application that it does not have by default.
- Request: an attempt by one machine to contact another over the internet.
- Client: an application or machine that accesses services being provided by a server through the internet.
- Web Server: a combination of software and hardware that uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and other protocols to respond to requests made over the internet.
- Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI): an interface between web servers and applications.
- Template Engine: software that takes in strings with tokenized values, replacing the tokens with their values as output in a web browser.
To get the most out of Flask, it is a good idea to connect it to a database for long-term storage of important data. Flask works well with SQLAlchemy and Alembic in their base forms as we saw in Phase 3, but we will be using libraries specially tailored to Flask: Flask-SQLAlchemy and Flask-Migrate. While these are mostly the same as SQLAlchemy and Alembic, there are a few important differences to note before you start developing your own applications.
We will explore the integration of these libraries with Flask applications as well as these differences in this lesson.
Flask is, on its own, a very minimal framework. It provides what we need to deliver Python code to the web, but that's about it. That being said, it is also designed to be extended. This allows you to choose the tools that you would like to use for database management, migrations, web forms, authentication, and much more.
Many Flask extensions, such as Flask-SQLAlchemy and Flask-Migrate, were created and are maintained by the Pallets Projects community. That being said, Flask is a Python web framework, and you can use any Python libraries that you think would benefit your project.