Other software

Flask-Navigation

Flask-Nav owes a some good core ideas to Flask-Navigation, which is about a year older and the first place the author looked before deciding to write Flask-Nav. In defense of the reimplementation (opposed to just submitting patches for Flask-Navigation) [1], here are some key differences:

  • Flask-Navigation rolls all element types into a single Item class, which serves as label, view and link element. This makes it a little hard to extend.
  • The HTML generation in Flask-Navigation is done inside the package itself, while Flask-Nav uses a more complete, external solution.
  • Navigational structure creation and rendering are separate in Flask-Nav (see Renderer). This allows for more than one way of rendering the same navbar, allowing other packages (such as Flask-Bootstrap, see below) to supply renderers as well.
  • Some technical choices were deemed a little strange and have been avoided (BoundTypeProperty).
  • While Flask-Navigation uses signals and hooks to regenerate navigation bars on every request, Flask-Nav achieves dynamic behaviour by lazily instantiating naviigation bars when they are needed and at the last possible moment.
[1]All this information refers to Flask-Navigation 0.2.0 or 38fa83, which were the most recent versions when Flask-Nav was written.

Flask-Bootstrap

The initial driving force behind Flask-Nav was the desire to create a macro for Flask-Bootstrap that would render Bootstrap-y navigational items. See the Flask-Bootstrap docs for details.