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

Mapping URL patterns to request handlers


We must map URL patterns to our previously coded subclasses of tornado.web.RequestHandler. The following lines create the main entry point for the application, initialize it with the URL patterns for the API, and starts listening for requests. Open the previously created api.py file and add the following lines. The code file for the sample is included in the restful_python_chapter_09_01 folder:

application = web.Application([ 
    (r"/hexacopters/([0-9]+)", HexacopterHandler), 
    (r"/leds/([0-9]+)", LedHandler), 
    (r"/altimeters/([0-9]+)", AltimeterHandler), 
], debug=True) 
 
 
if __name__ == "__main__": 
    port = 8888 
    print("Listening at port {0}".format(port)) 
    application.listen(port) 
    ioloop.IOLoop.instance().start() 

The preceding code creates an instance of tornado.web.Application named application with the collection of request handlers that make up the Web application. The code passes a list of tuples to the Application...