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

Managing serialization and deserialization with relationships and hyperlinks


Our new RESTful Web API has to be able to serialize and deserialize the EsrbRating, Game, Player, and PlayerScore instances into JSON representations. In this case, we also have to pay special attention to the relationships between the different models when we create the serializer classes to manage serialization to JSON and deserialization from JSON.

In our last version of the previous API, we created a subclass of the rest_framework.serializers.ModelSerializer class to make it easier to generate a serializer and reduce boilerplate code. In this case, we will also declare a class that inherits from ModelSerializer but three classes will inherit from the rest_framework.serializers.HyperlinkedModelSerializer class.

HyperlinkedModelSerializer is a type of ModelSerializer that uses hyperlinked relationships instead of primary key relationships, and therefore, it represents the relationships to other model instances with...