This week in Software Engineering, we implemented several relational algebra operations in Python, including project, cross join, theta join, and natural join. Although we will not be using these implementations directly in Python, it was useful to use a language we were already familiar with to explain a new concept. We also were introduced to xml and json along with the schemas used to define types and pointers within them. It was useful to learn about the advantages and disadvantages of each type of schema and see how they could be applied to the same dataset.

We also wrapped up the first phase of the IDB project on Thursday. This phase took a bit longer than we expected, especially in creating the static pages for the website and making those pages responsive. I hope that we will be able to reuse some of the code in the next phase of the project since it seems like most of the work will be in implementing the RESTful API and database. I’m honestly more excited about this phase since it involves more backend work. In addition, there will be opportunities to improve upon our existing website without having to go through the steps of setting everything up again.

For the software tip of the week, Gunicorn is a WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) HTTP Server that can be used to serve Flask applications. Since app.run() in Flask is only intended for development use, we encountered issues on connections no longer going through. There is a tutorial here on how to deploy an application.