.. _advanced_foreword:

Foreword for Experienced Programmers
====================================

Thread-Locals in Flask
----------------------

One of the design decisions in Flask was that simple tasks should be simple;
they should not take a lot of code and yet they should not limit you. Because
of that, Flask has few design choices that some people might find surprising or
unorthodox. For example, Flask uses thread-local objects internally so that you
don’t have to pass objects around from function to function within a request in
order to stay threadsafe. This approach is convenient, but requires a valid
request context for dependency injection or when attempting to reuse code which
uses a value pegged to the request.  The Flask project is honest about
thread-locals, does not hide them, and calls out in the code and documentation
where they are used.

Develop for the Web with Caution
--------------------------------

Always keep security in mind when building web applications.

If you write a web application, you are probably allowing users to register
and leave their data on your server.  The users are entrusting you with data.
And even if you are the only user that might leave data in your application,
you still want that data to be stored securely.

Unfortunately, there are many ways the security of a web application can be
compromised.  Flask protects you against one of the most common security
problems of modern web applications: cross-site scripting (XSS).  Unless you
deliberately mark insecure HTML as secure, Flask and the underlying Jinja2
template engine have you covered.  But there are many more ways to cause
security problems.

The documentation will warn you about aspects of web development that require
attention to security.  Some of these security concerns are far more complex
than one might think, and we all sometimes underestimate the likelihood that a
vulnerability will be exploited - until a clever attacker figures out a way to
exploit our applications.  And don't think that your application is not
important enough to attract an attacker.  Depending on the kind of attack,
chances are that automated bots are probing for ways to fill your database with
spam, links to malicious software, and the like.

Flask is no different from any other framework in that you the developer must
build with caution, watching for exploits when building to your requirements.

The Status of Python 3
----------------------

Currently the Python community is in the process of improving libraries to
support the new iteration of the Python programming language.  While the
situation is greatly improving there are still some issues that make it
hard for users to switch over to Python 3 just now.  These problems are
partially caused by changes in the language that went unreviewed for too
long, partially also because we have not quite worked out how the lower-
level API should change to account for the Unicode differences in Python 3.

We strongly recommend using Python 2.6 and 2.7 with activated Python 3
warnings during development.  If you plan on upgrading to Python 3 in the
near future we strongly recommend that you read `How to write forwards
compatible Python code
<http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/1/22/forwards-compatible-python/>`_.

If you do want to dive into Python 3 already have a look at the
:ref:`python3_support` page.

Continue to :ref:`installation` or the :ref:`quickstart`.
