This week, I set up the backend for the webapp. Originally, I had wanted to use ExpressJs as the backend framework because of how lightweight it was. We also all have a little bit of experience with this. However, this past week, we decided it would be better to switch this to a Python Flask backend.
This decision was made with ease of integration in mind. Niko already wrote a significant portion of the interaction layer code in Python. Porting this over to Javascript would have been a ton of extra work with no extra benefits. At the time of this decision the backend wasn’t written or connected to the frontend yet, so switching the framework for it wouldn’t have resulted in any loss of work or time.
This week, I set up the Flask backend and connected it to the frontend so that Niko could implement the API using the library he wrote. I tested the backend/frontend connection by having the API return “dummy” or “fake” data. I knew the whole webapp was working by deploying the webapp locally and checking to see if every page showed correctly, displaying the dummy data.
I’m on schedule, and to stay this way, I’ll have to keep working diligently. I’ll have to help Rip a little bit with his hardware web application, because I have a bit more background with this kind of stuff than him.
