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

Writing request handlers


The main building blocks for a RESTful API in tornado are subclasses of the tornado.web.RequestHandler class, that is, the base class for HTTP request handlers in Tornado. We just need to create a subclass of this class and declare the methods for each supported HTTP verb. We have to override the methods to handle HTTP requests. Then, we have to map the URL patterns to each subclass of tornado.web.RequestHandler in the tornado.web.Application instance that represents the Tornado Web application.

First, we will create a HexacopterHandler class that we will use to handle requests for the hexacopter resource. Create a new api.py file. The following lines show all the necessary imports for the classes that we will create and the code that declares the HexacopterHandler class in the drone.py file. Enter the next lines in the new api.py file. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_chapter_09_01 folder:

import status 
from datetime import date 
from...