January 23rd - Learn Python and Flask

Team members involved: Michael Del Fante, Eric Oltean

The first steps that Eric and Michael took towards development for their capstone project was to learn the new technologies that we are going to be using. Neither of us have any prior experience with Python or Flask, which is a Python web framework. To learn Python, we ran through a series of exercises on Codecademy, a site that has tutorials for various web programming languages. Here's a screenshot of the progress we made learning Python.

Next, we went through some of the Flask documentation and tutorials to learn the basics of Flask. First, we read through the quickstart tutorial. Then, we went through a tutorial of creating a basic blog application called Flaskr. This tutorial creates a simple blog that allows one user to log in/log out, add a new post, and view all posts. The tutorial uses just the Flask framework and a SQLite database that is already installed with Python. This tutorial taught us how to get set up and connect to the database, write functions to determine logic for the views, create HTML templates using Jinja2, and where to store additional css and Javascript files. Below is a zip of the source code I created by following this tutorial, along with a screenshot of it working.

flask_tutorial.zip