Saturday, October 27, 2012

Stumped (temporarily)!

As part of my plan to take over the world get myself busy over the extended break, I decided to build a small web application using Flask on Google AppEngine.

In the beginning, it was all good. Since AppEngine comes with Jinja2 support (Python 2.5, Python 2.7), all I basically needed to do was unpack Flask and Werkzeug into my application folder. I created a basic app, set up my templates and static assets, and everything seemed great.

The problem began when I decided to use WTForms support via Flask-WTF. Apparently, some magic which I don't quite understand yet goes on in the loading of Flask extensions, or something, but I get errors trying to use Flask-WTF.

I'm not the only person to have this problem, but the fix suggested in this Stackoverflow thread didn't work for me so far. So I'm left with a couple of options:
  • Scrap using Flask-WTF and use plain old WTForms directly. Since I'm using the AppEngine modelform extension for WTForms right now, maybe that might not be a bad idea.
  • Stick with using the provided libraries for AppEngine, meaning I might end up using Django, or webapp2.
  • Abandon project altogether.
  • Use some other host, maybe Heroku.
  • Kamal Gill has a very nice Flask template for AppEngine over here. It's got support for Flask-WTF, Blinker, Bootstrap and Modernizr. Some of the package versions are a little old, but it's actively developed (changes are as recent as less than a month ago).

Doesn't matter. Everything seems clearer after you've eaten. Which I haven't.

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