Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript

Appendix A. Moving from Development to Production

In this appendix, we’ll skim the surface of some big subjects and hopefully provide a good starting point and some sensible directions to follow. How far you need to develop these skills will depend on the scope of your job or projects. Hopefully you won’t be required to extend your authentication or deployment skills too far, or you’ll quickly find yourself doing more webdev and systems admin than dataviz. But testing is a generic programming skill for life and you probably want to be strengthening that core as you go. Decent project configuration skills are a very dependable asset, too. Using the following sections, I’d recommend taking your first Flask app with JavaScript project and making sure you can serve it on Apache with basic authentication, some unit tests, and at least two configuration states (e.g., production and development).

In covering the webdev sections of this book, the aim has been to give you a lightweight, pared-down starting point so that you can learn anything else you require on a need-to-know basis. In this sense, it’s been set in a development environment. Sometimes, if you’re working on a fast and dirty prototype, you won’t need to stray too far from your development setup. But often, out there in the real world, you’ll be working on a project that demands different environments for development and production (and maybe one for tests as well). Although both environments use testing, things like authentication ...