How I hacked a FLASK app to create NETFLIX / IMDb like back-end !

Introduction :The latest “mini project” which I worked on as an assignment is a piece of beauty, this system was designed and developed solely by me.

Brief description :

What I expected to create/code: It all started as joke to create a clone of IMDb just to demonstrate CRUD operations on Mongo, an overly ambitious side project.. Which is in no way what one would picture as mini project, but I had already downloaded 5000+ movies dataset from Kaggle (had no way of indexing them earlier, I downloaded it to have a list of some great movies to binge watch over the weekends) and had explored Flask for a while when working on the final year Engineering project [which is an excellent project worth another story /answer] coming back to this mini project… integrating stuff and putting it to work on as MEAN application seemed manageable

What it turned out in reality :

So I started with Mongo import and dumped the csv into Mongo collection, then interfaced python script with Mongo database using pymongo, and coded the flask app to return movie documents /objects on the browser as JSON Objects. So basically I created a pretty great API for movie browsing and keyword based search, I could easily filter movies based on any of the object attributes like name of actors, director, title of movie, genre, rating, plot /keyword description etc. And list /display their details in Json format. All which remained was to plug this to a brilliant flashy frontend which was crisp and responsive, and you get a IMDb clone, powerful and efficient then the current one…(just kidding). But the inherent lazy person in me stopped from designing an overkill solution, cause the grades and effort were not in proportion and besides I was bored with writing such an exhaustive and comprehensive application within just around some 15 lines of Python code, and plain lazy to plug into a web template,(css, bootstrap is not one of my strong suits cause I don’t consider templating and formatting/styling as coding/programming). So I just decided to stop at the API backend powered by Flask web app along with Mongo all this in around 15 lines of python code.. That’s the cool /awesome part about it.

OK :)

Originally published at www.quora.com.