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- <div class="section" id="design-decisions-in-flask">
-<span id="design"></span><h1>Design Decisions in Flask<a class="headerlink" href="#design-decisions-in-flask" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
-<p>If you are curious why Flask does certain things the way it does and not
-differently, this section is for you. This should give you an idea about
-some of the design decisions that may appear arbitrary and surprising at
-first, especially in direct comparison with other frameworks.</p>
-<div class="section" id="the-explicit-application-object">
-<h2>The Explicit Application Object<a class="headerlink" href="#the-explicit-application-object" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
-<p>A Python web application based on WSGI has to have one central callable
-object that implements the actual application. In Flask this is an
-instance of the <a class="reference internal" href="api.html#flask.Flask" title="flask.Flask"><tt class="xref py py-class docutils literal"><span class="pre">Flask</span></tt></a> class. Each Flask application has
-to create an instance of this class itself and pass it the name of the
-module, but why can&#8217;t Flask do that itself?</p>
-<p>Without such an explicit application object the following code:</p>
-<div class="highlight-python"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="kn">from</span> <span class="nn">flask</span> <span class="kn">import</span> <span class="n">Flask</span>
-<span class="n">app</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">Flask</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">__name__</span><span class="p">)</span>
-
-<span class="nd">@app.route</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s">&#39;/&#39;</span><span class="p">)</span>
-<span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">index</span><span class="p">():</span>
- <span class="k">return</span> <span class="s">&#39;Hello World!&#39;</span>
-</pre></div>
-</div>
-<p>Would look like this instead:</p>
-<div class="highlight-python"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="kn">from</span> <span class="nn">hypothetical_flask</span> <span class="kn">import</span> <span class="n">route</span>
-
-<span class="nd">@route</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s">&#39;/&#39;</span><span class="p">)</span>
-<span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">index</span><span class="p">():</span>
- <span class="k">return</span> <span class="s">&#39;Hello World!&#39;</span>
-</pre></div>
-</div>
-<p>There are three major reasons for this. The most important one is that
-implicit application objects require that there may only be one instance at
-the time. There are ways to fake multiple applications with a single
-application object, like maintaining a stack of applications, but this
-causes some problems I won&#8217;t outline here in detail. Now the question is:
-when does a microframework need more than one application at the same
-time? A good example for this is unittesting. When you want to test
-something it can be very helpful to create a minimal application to test
-specific behavior. When the application object is deleted everything it
-allocated will be freed again.</p>
-<p>Another thing that becomes possible when you have an explicit object lying
-around in your code is that you can subclass the base class
-(<a class="reference internal" href="api.html#flask.Flask" title="flask.Flask"><tt class="xref py py-class docutils literal"><span class="pre">Flask</span></tt></a>) to alter specific behaviour. This would not be
-possible without hacks if the object were created ahead of time for you
-based on a class that is not exposed to you.</p>
-<p>But there is another very important reason why Flask depends on an
-explicit instantiation of that class: the package name. Whenever you
-create a Flask instance you usually pass it <cite>__name__</cite> as package name.
-Flask depends on that information to properly load resources relative
-to your module. With Python&#8217;s outstanding support for reflection it can
-then access the package to figure out where the templates and static files
-are stored (see <a class="reference internal" href="api.html#flask.Flask.open_resource" title="flask.Flask.open_resource"><tt class="xref py py-meth docutils literal"><span class="pre">open_resource()</span></tt></a>). Now obviously there
-are frameworks around that do not need any configuration and will still be
-able to load templates relative to your application module. But they have
-to use the current working directory for that, which is a very unreliable
-way to determine where the application is. The current working directory
-is process-wide and if you are running multiple applications in one
-process (which could happen in a webserver without you knowing) the paths
-will be off. Worse: many webservers do not set the working directory to
-the directory of your application but to the document root which does not
-have to be the same folder.</p>
-<p>The third reason is &#8220;explicit is better than implicit&#8221;. That object is
-your WSGI application, you don&#8217;t have to remember anything else. If you
-want to apply a WSGI middleware, just wrap it and you&#8217;re done (though
-there are better ways to do that so that you do not lose the reference
-to the application object <a class="reference internal" href="api.html#flask.Flask.wsgi_app" title="flask.Flask.wsgi_app"><tt class="xref py py-meth docutils literal"><span class="pre">wsgi_app()</span></tt></a>).</p>
-<p>Furthermore this design makes it possible to use a factory function to
-create the application which is very helpful for unittesting and similar
-things (<a class="reference internal" href="patterns/appfactories.html#app-factories"><em>Application Factories</em></a>).</p>
-</div>
-<div class="section" id="the-routing-system">
-<h2>The Routing System<a class="headerlink" href="#the-routing-system" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
-<p>Flask uses the Werkzeug routing system which has was designed to
-automatically order routes by complexity. This means that you can declare
-routes in arbitrary order and they will still work as expected. This is a
-requirement if you want to properly implement decorator based routing
-since decorators could be fired in undefined order when the application is
-split into multiple modules.</p>
-<p>Another design decision with the Werkzeug routing system is that routes
-in Werkzeug try to ensure that there is that URLs are unique. Werkzeug
-will go quite far with that in that it will automatically redirect to a
-canonical URL if a route is ambiguous.</p>
-</div>
-<div class="section" id="one-template-engine">
-<h2>One Template Engine<a class="headerlink" href="#one-template-engine" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
-<p>Flask decides on one template engine: Jinja2. Why doesn&#8217;t Flask have a
-pluggable template engine interface? You can obviously use a different
-template engine, but Flask will still configure Jinja2 for you. While
-that limitation that Jinja2 is <em>always</em> configured will probably go away,
-the decision to bundle one template engine and use that will not.</p>
-<p>Template engines are like programming languages and each of those engines
-has a certain understanding about how things work. On the surface they
-all work the same: you tell the engine to evaluate a template with a set
-of variables and take the return value as string.</p>
-<p>But that&#8217;s about where similarities end. Jinja2 for example has an
-extensive filter system, a certain way to do template inheritance, support
-for reusable blocks (macros) that can be used from inside templates and
-also from Python code, uses Unicode for all operations, supports
-iterative template rendering, configurable syntax and more. On the other
-hand an engine like Genshi is based on XML stream evaluation, template
-inheritance by taking the availability of XPath into account and more.
-Mako on the other hand treats templates similar to Python modules.</p>
-<p>When it comes to connecting a template engine with an application or
-framework there is more than just rendering templates. For instance,
-Flask uses Jinja2&#8217;s extensive autoescaping support. Also it provides
-ways to access macros from Jinja2 templates.</p>
-<p>A template abstraction layer that would not take the unique features of
-the template engines away is a science on its own and a too large
-undertaking for a microframework like Flask.</p>
-<p>Furthermore extensions can then easily depend on one template language
-being present. You can easily use your own templating language, but an
-extension could still depend on Jinja itself.</p>
-</div>
-<div class="section" id="micro-with-dependencies">
-<h2>Micro with Dependencies<a class="headerlink" href="#micro-with-dependencies" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
-<p>Why does Flask call itself a microframework and yet it depends on two
-libraries (namely Werkzeug and Jinja2). Why shouldn&#8217;t it? If we look
-over to the Ruby side of web development there we have a protocol very
-similar to WSGI. Just that it&#8217;s called Rack there, but besides that it
-looks very much like a WSGI rendition for Ruby. But nearly all
-applications in Ruby land do not work with Rack directly, but on top of a
-library with the same name. This Rack library has two equivalents in
-Python: WebOb (formerly Paste) and Werkzeug. Paste is still around but
-from my understanding it&#8217;s sort of deprecated in favour of WebOb. The
-development of WebOb and Werkzeug started side by side with similar ideas
-in mind: be a good implementation of WSGI for other applications to take
-advantage.</p>
-<p>Flask is a framework that takes advantage of the work already done by
-Werkzeug to properly interface WSGI (which can be a complex task at
-times). Thanks to recent developments in the Python package
-infrastructure, packages with dependencies are no longer an issue and
-there are very few reasons against having libraries that depend on others.</p>
-</div>
-<div class="section" id="thread-locals">
-<h2>Thread Locals<a class="headerlink" href="#thread-locals" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
-<p>Flask uses thread local objects (context local objects in fact, they
-support greenlet contexts as well) for request, session and an extra
-object you can put your own things on (<a class="reference internal" href="api.html#flask.g" title="flask.g"><tt class="xref py py-data docutils literal"><span class="pre">g</span></tt></a>). Why is that and
-isn&#8217;t that a bad idea?</p>
-<p>Yes it is usually not such a bright idea to use thread locals. They cause
-troubles for servers that are not based on the concept of threads and make
-large applications harder to maintain. However Flask is just not designed
-for large applications or asynchronous servers. Flask wants to make it
-quick and easy to write a traditional web application.</p>
-<p>Also see the <a class="reference internal" href="becomingbig.html#becomingbig"><em>Becoming Big</em></a> section of the documentation for some
-inspiration for larger applications based on Flask.</p>
-</div>
-<div class="section" id="what-flask-is-what-flask-is-not">
-<h2>What Flask is, What Flask is Not<a class="headerlink" href="#what-flask-is-what-flask-is-not" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
-<p>Flask will never have a database layer. It will not have a form library
-or anything else in that direction. Flask itself just bridges to Werkzeug
-to implement a proper WSGI application and to Jinja2 to handle templating.
-It also binds to a few common standard library packages such as logging.
-Everything else is up for extensions.</p>
-<p>Why is this the case? Because people have different preferences and
-requirements and Flask could not meet those if it would force any of this
-into the core. The majority of web applications will need a template
-engine in some sort. However not every application needs a SQL database.</p>
-<p>The idea of Flask is to build a good foundation for all applications.
-Everything else is up to you or extensions.</p>
-</div>
-</div>
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- <h3><a href="index.html">Table Of Contents</a></h3>
- <ul>
-<li><a class="reference internal" href="#">Design Decisions in Flask</a><ul>
-<li><a class="reference internal" href="#the-explicit-application-object">The Explicit Application Object</a></li>
-<li><a class="reference internal" href="#the-routing-system">The Routing System</a></li>
-<li><a class="reference internal" href="#one-template-engine">One Template Engine</a></li>
-<li><a class="reference internal" href="#micro-with-dependencies">Micro with Dependencies</a></li>
-<li><a class="reference internal" href="#thread-locals">Thread Locals</a></li>
-<li><a class="reference internal" href="#what-flask-is-what-flask-is-not">What Flask is, What Flask is Not</a></li>
-</ul>
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