[Flask] Need pointers to general introduction to web frameworks

[Corey Boyle]

Flask Web Development: Developing Web Applications with Python
by Miguel Grinberg
Link: http://a.co/d/iI8WfXZ

This book is an excellent way to get started with Flask.

Flask is just a bunch of glue code that saves you the pain of building
a router yourself.
Flask has a builtin web server, but it's only intended for development purposes.
You will need to host your production code on-top of Apache or
GUnicorn or any number of other web servers.

On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 4:18 AM Thomas Prebble <thomas.prebble at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Michael,
>
> I'm not all too familiar with the internals of Slack but the Readme suggests that Slack makes a request to /slack/message_options to populate a menu and then makes a request to /slack/message_actions with the user selection (which is analogous to a callback). This is a fairly common pattern for extending third party applications. That's a very brief explanation but hopefully understandable.
>
> The term "web server" has different meanings to different people. I would suggest reading https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-web-server-and-web-application and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/936197/what-is-the-difference-between-application-server-and-web-server which should give you a decent breakdown of the two.
>
> Frameworks are a big topic but you might try viewing them as libraries. The key difference to "fully fledged" frameworks versus micro-frameworks comes down to the functionality they provide out of the box. For example Django (another Python web application framework) has it's own ORM (for working with databases), templating language and support for i18n. Flask (a micro-framework) at it's core doesn't maintain any of this and relies on third party plugins to support such use cases and more. This gives the developer more freedom to choose which components he might need to incorporate into a given project without including anything else.
>
> Hopefully that helps?
>
> Thomas
>
> On Wed, 26 Sep 2018 at 16:14, Michael Mossey <michaelmossey at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> A few days ago a friend asked me to help build a Slack app in Python, something that posts a message with buttons and a dialog. I found this example:
>>
>> https://github.com/slackapi/python-message-menu-example
>>
>> (this example uses Flask as well as the Python slack API)
>>
>> I'm a programmer, but don't have much web experience. I'm discovering that there is a whole world I don't really understand, and it's kind of hard to find an introduction to it, because everything seems to assume that I already understand the basics.
>>
>> If these are basic questions, don't feel a need to answer it completely, but a few pointers as to what's going on and then where to look for more would be appreciated.
>>
>> First, I don't understand what role Flask plays in this example. Is Flask a web server? Is it some kind of server that browsers contact and interact with, even if not as full-featured as Apache? If not, what else is it? And what is Flask doing in this Slack example?
>>
>> I read in the Flask documentation that it's a "micro-framework," but I don't know what a framework is. So I went here:
>>
>> https://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks
>>
>> and this is not much help, because it assumes I know what a "web application" is, or "server side technology", or "AJAX." I also don't know what "full stack" means.
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Flask mailing list
>> Flask at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/flask
>
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