CS257 Software Design
Friday, 11 April 2025

+ How's it going?
- CLI assignment, argparse, etc.
- Anything else?

+ Third-party libraries mini-rant
- Learning basics first
- Reliability of libraries & their authors
    long slow slides into badness
- Unnecessary complexity
- Supply-chain attacks
- Value of staying close to the middle
    of your standard tools

+ Heads up
- Team survey
- Now that you're coding, go back and read my
    "Using other people's code" document
- Monday assignment

+ Videos
- HTTP
- HTTP-based APIs and Flask

+ But briefly...
- What's JSON?
- What's HTTP? (hypertext transfer protocol)
- What's an API? (application programming interface)
    We're focusing on HTTP-based APIs in this class
- Where are we headed?
    - API design based on the questions you want to ask of your dataset
    - Database design to support those questions
    - Database population
    - API implementation <--- we're starting with tools for this today

+ Flask lab
- What's a virtual environment?
- Advantages and pitfalls of venv
- Let's walk through the venv installation
- Let's look at flask_sample.py together
- Now do the rest of the lab