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

Working with resourceful routing on top of Flask pluggable views


Flask-RESTful uses resources built on top of Flask pluggable views as the main building block for a RESTful API. We just need to create a subclass of the flask_restful.Resource class and declare the methods for each supported HTTP verb. A subclass of flask_restful.Resource represents a RESTful resource and therefore, we will have to declare one class to represent the collection of messages and another one to represent the message resource.

First, we will create a Message class that we will use to represent the message resource. Open the previously created api/api.py file and add the following lines. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_chapter_05_01 folder, as shown:

class Message(Resource): 
    def abort_if_message_doesnt_exist(self, id): 
        if id not in message_manager.messages: 
            abort( 
                status.HTTP_404_NOT_FOUND,  
                message="Message {0} doesn't exist...