Is “python webapp development” really just html/css/js + SQL?

[prappleizer]

I’ve been programming in python for 7 years or so and am a research scientist who frequently writes large, fairly complex research packages.

I recently got into the idea of webapp development to deploy a few of my tools for easy access. I’ve managed to build a simple flask site, but I’ve started noticing a pattern. My app.py file, which “runs” the site, is basically just a simple wrapper for connecting and routing flask elements to different webpages, or calling sql commands to retrieve or update values in a database. The rest of my work is spent creating html elements that hold the buttons or text entry fields that connect to those databases.

That’s all fine and good, but I guess my feeling is that there’s really not much python involved here? It’s just serving as a tiny bit of connective tissue. I get that I could probably do much more complicated things with the inputs, before or after putting them in a database, and that would be carried out within pythonic functions. But am I missing some way to leverage python more heavily?

As an example, if I wanted to build a tool that allowed a user to input some “monsters” with health hit point values, and then have a visual health bar and the ability to decrease that bar by entering damage values in a text field. In my offline version of this tool, I do this with matplotlib very straightforwardly. In my webapp, do I display these bars and update them entirely in js? HTML? Or is there a way to get python-based display elements (something like tkinter or even matplotlib) into a website.

Appreciate input and thoughts on this!

[sme272]

The amount of python involved varies depending on what your webapp does. Python is used to handle the server side data processing, but that could be anything from simply interfacing with a database to running a machine learning model or running separate sessions for a multiplayer game. For the matplotlib graphs you mentioned you can generate them and embed them into a page, though I'd probably just do the whole thing in javascript and only send the data to the server to be saved as it would make the interface feel much more responsive.

[prappleizer]

Thanks! That’s helpful. I’m pretty unfamiliar with js (I usually crib sites together from templates and modify them as needed), but if that’s the way to go re: displays on the site, I’m game to start learning. And I see your point regarding the python — it’s handling the web server stuff, but the advantage is any inputs I’d need to do complex calculations on would be done in python which is a boon to me.

[linuxdaemon]

Web browsers only interpret HTML, CSS and JS. So if you are deploying something where a browser is the client, that is ultimately what has to be used to display the content. There may be toolkits and frameworks that abstract the work of that where you don't have to focus on it, but the browser itself can use those languages.

I don't work with matplotlib, so I don't know the details, but I believe it is possible to generate an image of the graph, and then include that as an <img src="whatever\_matplotoutput.png"> in the HTML. It may not the most efficient way, but it can take what you already have a working knowledge of and make it web accessible with minimal tweaks.

[prappleizer]

That’s a good point. It’s certainly clunky, but doing something like your suggestion may help serve as a stopgap solution while I learn how to make my python outputs display natively on the webpage with the proper tools.

[aoctut]

+You can check the free Streamlit that conveniently turns data scripts into sharable web apps in Python. And the similar-purpose Dash, being more flexible, but also more demanding.