Philosophy of Flask-Diamond

Flask-Diamond provides a path that can guide your thought and development. Flask-Diamond is the road that leads to other ideas.

The following principles serve to guide the development of Flask-Diamond.

Inheritance

Flask-Diamond is primarily configured via Pythonic Inheritance. Your main application object will inherit from Flask-Diamond, and any functions you wish to customize must be overridden in order to change their behavior.

Economy

There are tons of libraries wrapped up in Flask-Diamond. If something has been done well by somebody else, then it is always preferable to leverage that work instead of re-building an unnecessary component.

Stable

Flask-Diamond versions are tied closely to specific versions of third-party libraries. When you stick with a specific version of Flask-Diamond, you can lock the version of third-party libraries too. The goal is to prevent any requirements from changing accidentally so that your application will be more resistant to code rot and API breakage.

Decomposable

Because third-party libraries are constantly changing, it is sometimes desirable to upgrade just one library without upgrading anything else. Flask-Diamond is built atop the Flask ecosystem, which is architecturally decomposable. Thus, extensions may be upgraded individually.

Data-centric

Flask-Diamond was originally built to support the research objectives of Ian Dennis Miller. Through his work on memes and social networks, Ian regularly needed to build lightweight API access to big data sets. Due to the precise nature of the SQL queries needed, a powerful standalone ORM like SQLAlchemy was preferred over the Django approach of bundling the ORM with the web platform. Thus, Flask-Diamond is suitable for projects that require raw access to SQL queries.

Sensible

Flask-Diamond is pretty sensible about the defaults it presents. A lot of decisions have already been made in the service of delivering a functioning application out-of-the-box. The goal is to enable a focus upon the unique parts of your application, rather than the common tasks that most applications need anyway.