Framewrk

Framewrk is a subscription service that entrepreneurs access online that serves up targeted feedback on their business to help them grow.

Project

• Our app follows Flask’s “application factory” method. The ‘core’ of our app lives within the /framewrk directory.
• /static contains all source and production compressed frontend (JS, CSS, etc).
• /templates contains all “pages” of our app, which are templates which dynamically build themselves at runtime.
• config.py holds all basic configuration information.
• /demo is a standalone app pertaining to the demo assembled in 2019.
• Files like Pipfile, Pipefile.lock, and requirements.txt are all related to our Python environment.

Backend

Framewrk is a web application build using Flask, a micro framework of Python. The choice to use this combination is highly intentional given the goals and aspirations of the product.

Core Technology

• The core of Framewrk will come down to executing significant & positive things with data. This makes Python an obvious choice.
• Framewrk is likely to grow quickly and adapt to needs faster. When we pair this with a quick-to-market mentality, we have a prime use case for Flask. Flask allows us to set up quick, scale effectively, and grants access to countless useful extensions.
• Selecting MongoDB, or specifically MongoDB Atlas paired with MongoDB Stitch offers a lot of advantages off the bat. NoSQL is obviously well suited for products where schemas are subject to change in our growth phase. Moreover, Stitch offers plenty of easy “backend as a service” features to assist in complex functionality such as user account creation out-of-the-box. As Framewrk matures, we may duplicate or transfer this data to traditional relational databases.
• A few of our Python libraries include:
  • WTForms: Handling user form validation and submission.
  • Flask-FileUpload: Used to upload files such as audio files by users.
  • Boto: Stores said files on an Amazon S3 bucket.
  • Flask-Login: Handling user sessions.

Architecture

• While initially set up as Heroku app, Framewrk is now hosted on DigitalOcean.
• We will be running a droplet serving our app as a WSGI app under NGINX.
• Our MongoDB instance is a cloud service existing separately.

Frontend

The frontend of Framewrk is not based on any particular frontend framework. We use LESS as a preprocessor, with perhaps a few choice elements extracted from sources here and there (for example, i below the logic for tooltips is a snippet from Bootstrap, but there was never an intention to import the entire Bootstrap library).

Technology

• Styles are handled in the SCSS syntax of Sass, utilizing the pysass Python library.
• Styles are bundled upon building the app - we may want to discuss how these bundles are served