First big project!

Hi Philip,

The first full stack project can certainly seem daunting. I encourage you to break this down into chunks as small as possible and work on them one by one. I'm also going to suggest that if Python is the language you're most comfortable in, and you're on a time constraint, pontificating about its pros and cons is not valuable.

As you've never "attached" a database to a website you might want to do a breif read of the Model, View, Controller (MVC) pattern. In short think of part of your Python program as your website's backend, it's going to connect to your database to read and write data. Another part of your program will take this data from the backend (from the backend's classes or functions) and display it to the user somehow, it will be rendered as web page content.

For connecting to the database with Python you can check out this course on Treehouse or you can look at the documentation for SQL Alchemy if you want another option.

I use Python for data plumbing, I tend to favour JavaScript for web development, so I can't help much with Django vs. Flask. (That's not a value judgement on either language, just where my experience is). I have heard other programmers say that Flask is more "light weight" than Django, but that can mean a lot of different things. Treehouse has full on tracks for both Flask and Django. My only real advice here is (as you're under a time constraint) whichever you choose, stick with it.

Cheers and good luck with your project!

I would recommend you jump in on the Django track.

Flask is great, but it's a micro framework so you'll be adding in a lot of bits and pieces here and there whereas Django comes with everything you need to start building. Django also has a nice admin panel built in that is pretty handy. The python courses here are tough and will kick your butt, however, you'll learn a lot.

If I remember correctly, both the Django and Flask tracks use SQLlite for dev which can be transferred to a full on production database later so you should be alright if you know the basics of SQL.

If you're not married to python, maybe consider Ruby on Rails for a quick MVP. Ruby's syntax is not too far off from python and it's not a difficult language to pickup.