Week 7: Thanks, Mr. Zhang!

Hello Friends,

This week was very exciting, since we’re starting to make the final product! Through the Python Flask framework, we can build web applications with ease. In the beginning of the week, I followed along with Miguel Grinberg’s Flask tutorial and practiced programming a microblog (similar to our senior project blogs!) If you are interested, check out the tutorial here: https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-i-hello-world

Then came in some difficulty. I’m kind of new at using Flask and web development, especially HTML. It was rather slow learning from online tutorials, until my external advisor helped me out with learning the programming. Turns out it is more simple when you break down the code into little parts. I’ll be writing more functional code next week, and maybe soon we can also try making the platform visually appealing. The Beautiful Soup package can help with this, and maybe I can try experimenting with Adobe Dreamweaver.

For now, I was able to create a simple “Upload Excel” functionality which allows a user to upload the file and have it displayed perfectly on the web app. After this, we can do some statistics on the data.

The files will be on GitHub soon! I will also be deploying the project to the web at the end!