Book Image

Functional Python Programming

By : Steven F. Lott, Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming

By: Steven F. Lott, Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Functional Python Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Defining web services as functions


We'll look at a RESTful web service, which can "slice and dice" a source of data and provide downloads as JSON, XML, or CSV files. We'll provide an overall WSGI-compatible wrapper but the functions which do the "real work" of the application won't be narrowly constrained to fit the WSGI.

We'll use a simple dataset with four subcollections: the Anscombe Quartet. We looked at ways to read and parse this data in Chapter 3, Functions, Iterators, and Generators". It's a small set of data but it can be used to show the principles of a RESTful web service.

We'll split our application into two tiers: a web tier, which will be a simple WSGI application, and the rest of the processing, which will be more typical functional programming. We'll look at the web tier first so that we can focus on a functional approach to provide meaningful results.

We need to provide two pieces of information to the web service:

  • The quartet that we want—this is a "slice and dice" operation...