Why Jython when you can microservice with Flask

Over the last little while I have been working on Sibbly it's my little pet project to try summarize, group, filter and target software development information on the web. All 'n all a rather ambitious task, but the worst thing that could happen is that I learn something, so there is really no risk. It is still currently in a very closed beta, only occasionally showing it to fellow work colleagues and getting some input.

After initially starting development for Sibbly on Ubuntu, as I was always planning on deploying on Ubuntu, I had migrated back to windows, and after a couple weeks of work when finally deploying to Ubuntu... Surprise! it obviously did work right off the bat.

The issue I ended up with was, there seems to be a classpath issue between Spring Boot, it's embedded Tomcat instance and Jython. The reason I use Jython is for an awesome library called Pygments.

So after much dismay and checking all the Java alternatives and attempted Pygment ports (jygments, jgments), I started thinking of alternate solutions.
Having recently read: Microservices I decided to look at a way of interacting with Python more indirectly.
This lead me to: Flask
Within a couple minutes thanks to: Awesome Flask Example
I had the following up and running:


What this little bit of Python does is wrap and expose the highlight and guess functionality from Pygments via a RESTful service accepting and producing JSON.

I deploy Sibbly on DigitalOcean
To install Python on my droplet, I followed the process below:

sudo apt-get install python-dev build-essential  
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev openssl
sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

export WORKON_HOME="$HOME/.virtualenvs"
source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh

sudo mkdir /opt/python3.4.1
wget http://python.org/ftp/python/3.4.1/Python-3.4.1.tgz
tar xvfz Python-3.4.1.tgz
cd Python-3.4.1
./configure --prefix=/opt/python3.4.1
make  
sudo make install

mkvirtualenv --python /opt/python3.4.1/bin/python3 py-3.4.1

workon py-3.4.1

pip install flask
pip install pygments

Once that was done to run the Flask app:

python app.py & disown