Senior Project Sprint 1: Research
This week I set off to learn a modern Python 3 web framework/server. I chose Python as it provides a good balance of runtime speed, scalability, and engineering time. Initially I was excited to work with Sanic, a lightweight open source web micro framework that takes advantage of uvloop & async/await to make the server’s request handling non-blocking. While Sanic would have been fun to work with, I feared it may not be production ready yet, and there is not much documentation available. You can read more about Sanic and its crazy speed here ( https://github.com/channelcat/sanic ).
In response to my earlier fears, I decided to go with what Sanic is based on, Flask. Flask is a Python web micro framework, that is simple, elegant, and very popular. Due to its popularity, it has been contributed to for years in the open source community, providing great documentation and reliability.
To learn more about Flask, I created a comment system at it would provide a simple introduction to making a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) application with Flask. I also used MySQL and Python’s modern ORM (Object Relational Mapper), SQLAlchemy. With an ORM, a software engineer does not need to write tedious and overly verbose SQL, but rather modify in memory objects and commit the changes to the database periodically. Coming from PHP, this was very enjoyable.
Finally, I deployed this to a PaaS (Platform as a Service) provider to learn more about deploying Flask. I will be working more extensively with these technologies as I am currently making the website for HackTCNJ 2017 with these technologies. For ship2pd, I would still like to use Firebase, but I need to determine if it is feasible.
This post and project (ship2pd) are requirements toward a senior project at The College of New Jersey’s Interactive Multimedia Department.
ship2pd is a new kind of shipping network. By taking advantage of everyday routes, ship2pd hopes to get the package to its recipient quicker, cheaper, friendlier, and greener. Think Uber for shipping.
