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Flask

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Flask vs Jinja2: What are the differences?

Introduction

Flask and Jinja2 are both popular frameworks used in web development. While Flask is a micro web framework for Python, Jinja2 is a templating engine also written in Python.

  1. Simplicity: Flask is designed to be simple and easy to understand, making it a great choice for beginners. It has a minimalist approach and provides only the essential tools for building a web application. On the other hand, Jinja2 is a powerful and flexible templating engine that provides a wide range of features such as template inheritance and macros. It allows developers to create complex web pages with dynamic content.

  2. Functionality: Flask handles the routing and request handling of web applications, while Jinja2 focuses on the presentation layer by providing a way to generate HTML or other markup languages based on templates. Flask acts as the back-end framework, handling the server-side logic, while Jinja2 handles the front-end rendering of data.

  3. Integration with Flask: Flask comes with Jinja2 as its default template engine. This means that Flask uses Jinja2 to render the templates and provide dynamic content. Jinja2 templates are written within Flask application, allowing easy integration of templates within Flask. Developers can make use of Flask’s functionality along with Jinja2 templates to build powerful web applications.

  4. Template Syntax: Jinja2 has its own template language and syntax which is different from HTML. It provides powerful features like loops, conditionals, macros, and filters which enable developers to write dynamic templates. Flask uses Jinja2’s syntax to render templates and provide dynamic content. Flask also provides additional features to Jinja2 such as extensions and custom filters to enhance template rendering functionality.

  5. Scalability: Flask is a micro web framework, which means it is lightweight and includes only the essential components. This makes it easy to scale and customize based on specific project requirements. On the other hand, Jinja2 is a powerful templating engine that can handle complex and dynamic web pages. It provides features like template inheritance, which allows developers to define a base template and extend it with child templates, making it easier to manage large-scale projects.

  6. Community Support: Both Flask and Jinja2 have a large and active community of developers. Flask has a strong and supportive community that provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and plugins to help developers. Jinja2 also has an active community that contributes to its development and provides support through forums, documentation, and examples.

In Summary, Flask is a minimalistic web framework that handles the server-side logic of web applications, while Jinja2 is a powerful templating engine that focuses on the presentation layer by rendering templates and providing dynamic content. Flask integrates with Jinja2 and provides additional functionality to enhance template rendering. Flask is lightweight and customizable, while Jinja2 is feature-rich and allows the creation of complex web pages. Both frameworks have active and supportive communities.

Advice on and Flask
kristan-dev
Senior Solutions Analyst · | 8 upvotes · 341.5K views

My journey to developing REST APIs started with Flask Restful, and I've found it to be enough for the needs of my project back then. Now that I've started investing more time on personal projects, I've yet to decide if I should move to use Django for writing REST APIs. I often see job posts looking for Python+Django developers, but it's usually for full-stack developers. I'm primarily interested in Data Engineering, so most of my web projects are back end.

Should I continue with what I know (Flask) or move on to Django?

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Replies (1)
Rafael Torres
Technical Lead at 4Agile · | 9 upvotes · 332K views

If you want to be a Web developer with knowledge in another frontend and NoSql technology, maybe continue with Flask. However, if you want to create very fast solutions to grow up with a new business and merge these with data analysis and other tools, Django is the answer. Basically read more about the service architecture where you feel more comfortable, Microservice or Monolithic, but please will not married with any because they solve issues to different contexts.

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Girish Sharma
Software Engineer at FireVisor Systems · | 6 upvotes · 270.6K views
Needs advice
on
BottleBottleFlaskFlask
and
NamekoNameko

Which is the best Python framework for microservices?

We are using Nameko for building microservices in Python. The things we really like are dependency injection and the ease with which one can expose endpoints via RPC over RabbitMQ. We are planning to try a tool that helps us write polyglot microservices and nameko is not super compatible with it. Also, we are a bit worried about the not so good community support from nameko and looking for a python alternate to write microservices.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
BottleBottle

Bottle is much less bloated and fast. Its built-in templating system is one of the fastest as it compiles the templates in bytecode. Also Bottle has no depenencies, preventing dependency bloat.

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Saurav Pandit
Application Devloper at Bny Mellon · | 6 upvotes · 286.9K views

I have just started learning Python 3 weeks ago. I want to create a REST API using python. The API will be used to save form data in an Oracle database. The front end is using AngularJS 8 with Angular Material. In python, there are so many frameworks to develop REST APIs.

I am looking for some suggestions which REST framework to choose?

Here are some features I am looking for:

  • Easy integration and unit testing, like in Angular. We just want to run a command.

  • Code packaging, like in java maven project we can build and package. I am looking for something which I can push in as an artifact and deploy whole code as a package.

  • Support for swagger/ OpenAPI

  • Support for JSON Web Token

  • Support for test case coverage report

Framework can have features included or can be available by extension. Also, you can suggest a framework other than the ones I have mentioned.

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Replies (1)
Recommends
on
FlaskFlask
at

For starters flask provides a beautiful and easy way to create REST APIs. Also its supported by excellent beginner docs as well as a very active community. Another good thing with Flask is its widely available list of plugins which allow you to build as you go. Its also good in performance and can scale to a quite decent level. However, if you are sure your project is going to be fairly big, it would be better to start with Django as it provides a lot of features out of the box and is extremely stable in performance. Both these frameworks have support for Swagger, JWT, Coverage Report although you have to install plugins for them. Deploying both of these are fairly simple and there is huge documentation available. Django has one of the best documentations I have come across. I hope I was able to answer your queries.

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Pros of Flask
  • 14
    Flexibilty
  • 10
    For it flexibility
  • 9
    Flexibilty and easy to use
  • 8
    Flask
  • 7
    User friendly
  • 6
    Secured
  • 5
    Unopinionated
  • 3
    Orm
  • 2
    Secure
  • 1
    Beautiful code
  • 1
    Easy to get started
  • 1
    Easy to develop and maintain applications
  • 1
    Not JS
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Documentation
  • 1
    Python
  • 1
    Minimal
  • 1
    Lightweight
  • 1
    Easy to setup and get it going
  • 1
    Perfect for small to large projects with superb docs.
  • 1
    Easy to integrate
  • 1
    Speed
  • 1
    Get started quickly
  • 1
    Customizable
  • 1
    Simple to use
  • 1
    Powerful
  • 1
    Rapid development
  • 0
    Open source
  • 0
    Well designed
  • 0
    Productive
  • 0
    Awesome
  • 0
    Expressive
  • 0
    Love it
Cons of Flask
  • 10
    Not JS
  • 7
    Context
  • 5
    Not fast
  • 1
    Don't has many module as in spring

What is Flask?

Flask is intended for getting started very quickly and was developed with best intentions in mind.

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What tools integrate with Flask?
What are some alternatives to and Flask?
Django
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Tornado
By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user.
ExpressJS
Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.
Node.js
Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
See all alternatives