Book Image

Building RESTful Python Web Services

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Building RESTful Python Web Services

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Python is the language of choice for millions of developers worldwide, due to its gentle learning curve as well as its vast applications in day-to-day programming. It serves the purpose of building great web services in the RESTful architecture. This book will show you the best tools you can use to build your own web services. Learn how to develop RESTful APIs using the popular Python frameworks and all the necessary stacks with Python, Django, Flask, and Tornado, combined with related libraries and tools. We will dive deep into each of these frameworks to build various web services, and will provide use cases and best practices on when to use a particular framework to get the best results. We will show you everything required to successfully develop RESTful APIs with the four frameworks such as request handling, URL mapping, serialization, validation, authentication, authorization, versioning, ORMs, databases, custom code for models and views, and asynchronous callbacks. At the end of each framework, we will add authentication and security to the RESTful APIs and prepare tests for it. By the end of the book, you will have a deep understanding of the stacks needed to build RESTful web services.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Building RESTful Python Web Services
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Refactoring code to take advantage of asynchronous decorators


It is extremely difficult to read and understand code split into different methods, such as the asynchronous code that requires working with callbacks that are executed once the asynchronous execution finishes. Luckily, Tornado provides a generator-based interface that enables us to write asynchronous code in request handlers in a single generator. We can avoid splitting our methods into multiple methods with callbacks by using the tornado.gen generator-based interface that Tornado provides to make it easier to work in an asynchronous environment.

The recommended way to write asynchronous code in Tornado is to use coroutines. Thus, we will refactor our existing code to use the @tornado.gen.coroutine decorator for asynchronous generators in the required methods that process the different HTTP requests in the subclasses of tornado.web.RequestHandler.

Tip

Instead of working with a chain of callbacks, coroutines use the Python yield...