Introduction

Started in the summer of 2019, I jumped in to learning Flask. This was brought about by wanting to archive and give ready access to my father’s recipe book he wrote in 1994. I’d share it with the rest of the family and any interested friends. It is also a great opportunity for Ryan to work on as he nears the end of his bachelor’s CS program at Portland State. At the same time, I figured from a user viewpoint that everyone could contribute and we’d have an Encylopedia Galactica of our family and friend’s go-to favorites.

Having done some simple web development with Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP, I decided to try something new: use Python as the server-side processing language. This brought me to Flask. Flask is very different than using PHP. Things are certainly more abstract in using the Flask framework compared to PHP code writing out HTML, but there is a lot of power in the way Flask has been developed, especially Flask’s use of Jinja2 to populate templates with data.

These docs will document the Flask application but also will explain the entire system setup, including the platform, supporting software and configuration. There’s a lot to cover. Fortunately there is no due-date for this, so we’ll keep chugging away at it. Coding is logical, but it’s also an art, and like Leonardo da Vinci once said, “art is never finished, only abandoned”.

–Robert Jones, August 2019