Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Python Web Services - Second Edition

By : Gaston C. Hillar
1 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On RESTful Python Web Services - Second Edition

1 (1)
By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Python is the language of choice for millions of developers worldwide that builds great web services in RESTful architecture. This second edition of Hands-On RESTful Python Web Services will cover the best tools you can use to build engaging web services. This book shows you how to develop RESTful APIs using the most popular Python frameworks and all the necessary stacks with Python, combined with related libraries and tools. You’ll learn to incorporate all new features of Python 3.7, Flask 1.0.2, Django 2.1, Tornado 5.1, and also a new framework, Pyramid. As you advance through the chapters, you will get to grips with each of these frameworks to build various web services, and be shown use cases and best practices covering when to use a particular framework. You’ll then successfully develop RESTful APIs with all frameworks and understand how each framework processes HTTP requests and routes URLs. You’ll also discover best practices for validation, serialization, and deserialization. In the concluding chapters, you will take advantage of specific features available in certain frameworks such as integrated ORMs, built-in authorization and authentication, and work with asynchronous code. At the end of each framework, you will write tests for RESTful APIs and improve code coverage. By the end of the book, you will have gained a deep understanding of the stacks needed to build RESTful web services.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Designing a RESTful API to interact with a simple SQLite database


Imagine that we have to start working on a mobile app that has to interact with a RESTful API to perform CRUD operations with games. We don't want to spend time choosing and configuring the most appropriate ORM (short for Object-Relational Mapping); we just want to finish the RESTful API as soon as possible to start interacting with it in our mobile app. We really want the games to persist in a database but we don't need it to be production-ready, and therefore, we can use the simplest possible relational database, as long as we don't have to spend time making complex installations or configurations.

We need the shortest possible development time. Django Rest Framework (DRF) will allow us to easily accomplish this task and start making HTTP requests to our first version of our RESTful web service. In this case, we will work with a very simple SQLite database, the default database for a new Django Rest Framework project.

First...