[Flask] Need pointers to general introduction to web frameworks

[Thomas Prebble]

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
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Flask at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/flask
>
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