Python for Finance: Analyze Big Financial Data

Rapid Web Applications

If the Python world were to be divided into continents, there might be, among others, the

science and finance content, the system administration continent, and for sure the web

development continent. Although not really transparent, it is highly probable that the web

development continent, to stay with this concept, might be one of the largest when it

comes to people (developers) populating it and houses (applications) built on it.

One of the major reasons for Python being strong in web development is the availability

of different high-level, full-stack frameworks. As the Python web page states:

A web application may use a combination of a base HTTP application server, a storage mechanism such as a

database, a template engine, a request dispatcher, an authentication module and an AJAX toolkit. These can be

individual components or be provided together in a high-level framework.

Among the most popular frameworks are:

Django

Flask

Pyramid/Pylons

TurboGears

Zope

It is safe to say that there is not a single framework that is best suited for everybody and

every different application type.

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All have their strengths (and sometimes weaknesses),

and often it is more a matter of taste (regarding architecture, style, syntax, APIs, etc.) what

framework is chosen.

One framework that has recently gained popularity quite rapidly is Flask. It is the

framework we use here, mainly for the following reasons:

Pythonic

Application development with Flask is really Pythonic, with a lot of the web-related

details being taken care of behind the scenes.

Compactness

It is not too complex and can therefore be learned quite rapidly; it is based mainly on

standard components and libraries widely used elsewhere.

Documentation

It is well documented, with both an online HTML version and a PDF with around 300

pages available at the time of this writing.

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The two main libraries that Flask relies on are:

Jinja2, a web templating language/engine for Python

Werkzeug, a WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) toolkit for Python

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