I wish more people would contribute information on using Flask at a larger scale. Everyone and their brother has written a basic tutorial outlining how to get up and running with Flask. This is a GREAT post and I do not want to demean it ... however I think that a lot of this can be gleaned from following along with the docs and experimenting with Flask in general.
I'd really love to see/hear some stories of others using Flask at a slightly larger scale. For example ... did your startup build their REST API in Flask? Sure, people say it's possible and outline a basic hello-world style REST app ... but in my experience it became a pain in the ass very quick. Primarily because no structure is enforced.
After being a Python dev for a long time, building quite a few big Django apps and a handful of tiny Flask apps I have finally jumped ship to Rails. I spent a week experimenting with various Pythonic combinations. Ultimately I had to ask myself ... "Why am I doing this? What the hell am I wasting my time with this lightweight framework?" I've built my current REST API in Rails and would not have it any other way. It's been tremendously efficient and performs great on my little Linode in London + PostgreSQL.
Having no structure enforced is also a good thing. It allows you to get into and work on the project faster without having to set up all your boilerplates that Django comes with.
Flask apps are supposed to be tiny. I personally use three different stacks for different things: web.py for larger projects, flask for midsized projects and bottlepy for really quick and dirty stateless projects
The author, emixam, is going to go deeper in the next part of the series. If I'm not mistaken, he'll show us the 'blueprints' concept - which I've understood is basically what "everone" who've contiuned developing their Flask code - starts using and keeps using.
So it's coming, hold on! :-)
On another note, I'd recommend that you check out my good pal Kenneth's link (also a comment to your comment).
It's basically a talk about a company that rewrote their current PHP site and took on Python and Flask - kept at it and banged out something pretty advanced. I liked watching it. I hope you do too.
I know Python well but don't know Ruby. I'd like to start building serious Web apps and would love to hear why you like RoR more than any of the Python frameworks. I am under the impression that though there are more people who know Python than Ruby, yet more Web dev is done with RoR than all of Python combined, and I'm curious why. What is it that is so attractive about Rails? And with Rails having been the #1 reason for people to learn Ruby for years now, why is there no parallel Python on Rails?
The trouble is, larger apps are logical extensions of smaller apps in Flask. I find it rather pleasant to use Flask to build large RESTful APIs, but I don't find there to be any interesting challenges or insights that would make it worthwhile to produce an article relating the experience. I'm afraid it's the same way for many people I know who are using Flask to build large APIs at their companies - the process is so predictably boring that I doubt any of them have even considered writing about it.
I'd really love to see/hear some stories of others using Flask at a slightly larger scale. For example ... did your startup build their REST API in Flask? Sure, people say it's possible and outline a basic hello-world style REST app ... but in my experience it became a pain in the ass very quick. Primarily because no structure is enforced.
After being a Python dev for a long time, building quite a few big Django apps and a handful of tiny Flask apps I have finally jumped ship to Rails. I spent a week experimenting with various Pythonic combinations. Ultimately I had to ask myself ... "Why am I doing this? What the hell am I wasting my time with this lightweight framework?" I've built my current REST API in Rails and would not have it any other way. It's been tremendously efficient and performs great on my little Linode in London + PostgreSQL.