Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Functional Python Programming - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

If you’re a Python developer who wants to discover how to take the power of functional programming (FP) and bring it into your own programs, then this book is essential for you, even if you know next to nothing about the paradigm. Starting with a general overview of functional concepts, you’ll explore common functional features such as first-class and higher-order functions, pure functions, and more. You’ll see how these are accomplished in Python 3.6 to give you the core foundations you’ll build upon. After that, you’ll discover common functional optimizations for Python to help your apps reach even higher speeds. You’ll learn FP concepts such as lazy evaluation using Python’s generator functions and expressions. Moving forward, you’ll learn to design and implement decorators to create composite functions. You'll also explore data preparation techniques and data exploration in depth, and see how the Python standard library fits the functional programming model. Finally, to top off your journey into the world of functional Python, you’ll at look at the PyMonad project and some larger examples to put everything into perspective.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 15. A Functional Approach to Web Services

We'll step away from the topic of Exploratory Data Analysis to look at web servers and web services. A web server is, to an extent, a cascade of functions. We can apply a number of functional design patterns to the problem of presenting web content. Our goal is to look at ways in which we can approachRepresentational State Transfer (REST). We want to build RESTful web services using functional design patterns.

We don't need to invent yet another Python web framework. Nor do we want to select from among the available frameworks. There are many web frameworks available in Python, each with a distinct set of features and advantages.

The intent of this chapter is to present some principles that can be applied to most of the available frameworks. This will let us leverage functional design patterns for presenting web content.

When we look at extremely large or complex datasets, we might want a web service that supports subsetting or searching. We...