WSGI and Jinja2

Introduction

You might have heard comments such as “Flask is 100% WSGI compliant” or, “Flask uses Jinja as a template language.” But what exactly does this mean? What are WSGI and Jinja2? Let’s learn what these terms mean and their significance concerning Flask!

Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI)

The Web Server Gateway Interface, or more commonly known as WSGI, is a standard that describes the specifications concerning the communication between a web server and a client application. The detail of these specifications is present in PEP333. Here are some benefits of WSGI:

• Flexibility with the components of the application.

• Interoperability within different Python frameworks.

• Scalability of the application with an increase in users.

• Efficiency in terms of speed of development.

We do not need to concern ourselves with the internal details of WSGI or how it is implemented because this aspect of the application is handled by the Flask module.

The Jinja template language

Jinja is a template language used in Python. But, you might ask, what exactly is a template language?

First, let’s recall what templates are. We said that the templates are the front-end, which the user sees. In the case of a website, the templates are the HTML pages. A template language is one that we can use inside HTML so that the content on the HTML page becomes dynamic.