Journey into GSoC — Part 4

The coding period has just started and I could tell that this going to be a lot busier than I’ve thought. I started off with initializing the Flutter application and the Flask backend for the project according to my milestone plan. I was constantly pinging my mentors as I had a lot of questions than answers as this is the beginning of the project.

I was given a brand-new git repository to work on where I forked and clone it to start working on the project. As I was working on two products, a web app and a mobile application, I separated them into 2 folders and having another folder for the backend Flask code.

I also created a MySQL database locally by Forward-Engineering the ER diagram that I have created last week using MySQL Workbench and it worked without a hitch creating all the tables and relations as I expected.

Connecting the flutter app, flask and the SQL database was the next challenge for me this week. I was able to connect the Flask server with the Flutter app using the HTTP library of flutter just as we would do for a usual REST API. I was also fascinated by the simplicity and the elegance of Flask while using it. I used SQLAlchemy, an open-source SQL toolkit for Python to connect the Flask server to the MySQL database. It took me some tries to get it working. But in the end, everything falls into place and I was able to create a basic connection between the app, the server and the database. But of course, this will not suffice for the project I have in mind and I have a long way ahead of me.

Now that the initial configuration is done, now comes the fun part where I actually have to develop the application. But that’s something for the next week! Until then, stay safe and cheers!