Python: Building a Basic Web Application 🌐

Python is an incredibly popular programming language, known for its simplicity and flexibility. It is used in a variety of domains, from data analysis to web development. In this tutorial, we'll build a basic web application in Python, using the Flask framework.

Setting up the environment

Before you start, you need to have Python and Flask installed on your computer. If you don't already have them, you can download Python here and install Flask using pip, which is Python's package manager:

pip install flask

Creating the Application

Let's start by creating a new Python file, which we'll call app.py. At the top of the file, we import Flask:

from flask import Flask

Next, we create an instance of the Flask class:

app = Flask(__name__)

Now we can start defining the routes for our application. Let's start with a route to the home page. To do this, we use the @app.route decorator and define a function that will be called when the route is accessed:

@app.route('/')def home():    return "Hello, world!"

And that's all we need for a basic web application! To run the application, we add the following to the end of our file:

if __name__ == '__main__':    app.run(debug=True)

Now, if you run your Python file (python app.py), you'll see that your application is running at http://127.0.0.1:5000/. If you open this address in your browser, you'll see the message "Hello, world!".

Adding More Routes

Of course, a real application would have more than one route. Let's add a new route for an "About" page:

@app.route('/about')def about():    return "This is the about page!"

Now, if you access http://127.0.0.1:5000/about, you will see the message "This is the about page!".

Conclusion

With that, we've created a simple web application with Python and Flask! Of course, this is a very basic application, and there's a lot more you can do with Flask. You can add templates, forms, databases and much more. But that's a good start!

To continue learning and improving your Python programming skills, check out the article on Learning About Web Scraping: Extracting Data From Scratch.

Let's go 🦅