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Git-Truck / Examples

Flask - Why Is it Called a Micro-Web-Framework?

In programming, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Our code always depends on other people’s code.

One such giant for Python web applications is Flask – which calls itself a micro web framework. I always knew it was supposed to be a lightweight alternative to Django, but how much more lightweight was never clear. To analyze it we run:

git clone https://github.com/pallets/flask.git
npx git-truck@latest

If we highlight the files that have a single author in the whole project we see that

• very few files actually have single authors
• app.py - one of the main files (we’ll see later why) has 133 authors

That’s nice, looks like a collaborative project with apparently a low truck-factor.

Highlighting commits on both color intensity and file size we get the view below which shows that outstanding effort is made in changing the app.py file.

In fact, the repository contains as much effort in the docs and tests as it has in the actual implementation. If we zoom into the src/flask folder we see that there is only a handful of files that make the project.

It becomes now evident why the project is considered a lightweight project in comparison with the main web app alternative: Django, the source code folder of which is presented below.

To get the interactive view of Django run:

git clone https://github.com/django/django.git
npx git-truck@latest