Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Using the Flask framework for RESTful APIs

Many web applications have several layers. The layers often follow this pattern:

  • A presentation layer. This might run on a mobile device or a computer's browser. This is the visible, external view of the application. Because of the variety of mobile devices and browsers, there may be many clients for an application.
  • An application layer. This is often implemented as a RESTful API to provide web services. This layer does the processing to support the web or mobile presentation. This can be built using Python and the Flask framework.
  • A persistence layer. This handles the retention of data and transaction state over a single session as well as across multiple sessions from a single user. This is often a database, but in some cases the OS filesystem is adequate.

The Flask framework is very helpful for creating the application layer of a web service. It can serve HTML and JavaScript to provide a presentation...