Mastering Python for Web Development.
Tags: webdev, beginners, programming, python
Published: 2022-05-04 07:13:50

**Web Development** is loosely defined as building, creating, and maintaining websites. It involves a frontend, everything that interacts with the client, and a backend, which contains business logic and interacts with a database.

### *Advantages of using python for web development*

- *Wide spread popularity*
Python is one of the most popular languages in the world, with communities from all over the world it provides extensive support and framework for one to begin their developer journey.

- *Easy to learn*
Python is popular among first time learners since it has lower barrier to entry since the code is easily understood.The language relies on common expressions and whitespace, which allows you to write significantly less code compared to some other languages like Java or C++. 

- *Rich ecosystem and libraries*
Python offers a vast range of library tools and packages, which allows you to access much pre-written code, streamlining your application development time.

- *Large Community*
Python has a large community of developers using it, which is because of its wide acceptance. This makes it easy for beginners 
 who have questions. Moreover, the issues that developers face when developing applications are either already resolved or will be resolved quickly as there are a large number of developers who are willing to help.

- *Fast,Powerful & Productive*

- *User friendly runs everywhere*

- *More Versatile than PHP*

- *Readable Flexible & Secure*

- *Extensible & Intergrable*

### *Python Web Framework*

A **framework** is a collection of pre-written packages and modules that supports the development of web applications, making development faster and easier, and your programs more reliable and scalable.

Python is mostly used for building the backend. Python frameworks take care of dealing with tasks that are related to backend application development, such as parsing HTTP requests, generating HTTP responses, accessing the database, authentication, authorization, etc.
Some of the popular python web frameworks include;

- *Django*
Is a Python web framework that offers an open-source, high-level framework that “encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.” It’s fast, secure, and scalable. Django offers strong community support and detailed documentation.

One of the reasons for Django’s popularity is that it is quite easy to learn and use, especially because of its pluggable architecture. Django allows you to build small decoupled apps that can be included or plugged into larger projects. In Django, you get apps and projects, where an app is a small self-contained codebase, while a project is a collection of multiple apps.

- *Flask*
It is a microframework meaning, it does not have a lot of features baked into it that the other web frameworks might have, such as templating, account authorization, authentication, etc.

Flask is minimalistic and lightweight, meaning that you add extensions and libraries that you need as you code without automatically being provided with it by the framework.

- Pyramid

- Web2Py

- Turbogears

- CherryPy

The framework one chooses is dependent on your skill level as a web developer:

If you are quite experienced, consider developing your program with something more “barebones”;Flask.You can also use it if you know a few libraries and only need a framework to deal with common webserver tasks such as HTTP communication, request parsing, etc.

For a developer with not much experience in web development or if you are tackling a big project and do not wish to deal with annoying low-level details, then Django is the right choice for you. You can also use it if you do not wish to deal with managing individual packages and integrating them later as Django comes with many packages by default

### *Python Libraries*
*Some useful Python libraries for web development to keep note of:*

- If you ever need a web crawler to extract data for your application, **Scrapy** is great for that. It’s a widely used library for scraping, data mining, automated testing, and more.

- **Zappa** is a powerful library for developing a serverless application on AWS Lambda.

- **Requests** is a library that allows you to send HTTP requests easily, which is used to communicate with an application, allowing you to get HTML pages or data, for example.

- Another useful library is **Dash**, which helps those developing web applications that have to do with data visualization. Built on top of Flask, it offers features like charts, graphs, dashboards, and more.